Brendan Faegre

Evaluating the four duo or solo percussion-focused CDs here involves putting aside ideas about drums and other idiophones being primarily vehicles of rhythm, beats or cadences. Instead the players from three continents make the percussion an integral part of timbral examination. Additionally none encompass the standard drum kit. Perhaps augmented with electronics, each percussionist uniquely creates a new configuration after stripping down the idiophones to their most basic architecture..

Brief – less than 19½ minutes – and targeted, Broken Mirrors figuratively collects reflective shards from American Brendan Faegre’s small drum kit and mono synthesizer to produce segmented layers of timbral vibrations. With reflective undercurrents he builds intersecting hand-hammered drum ratamacues and ruffs, snaky piano patterns and cymbal sizzles into a series of call-and-response vamps. Climaxing during the concluding “Broken Mirrors Part IV”, the explosive and thickening textures reach a keyboard-directed climax that after a quiet interlude projects a crescendo of gale-force percussion pops and an unvarying Autobahn-like drone.

More strident and much lengthier, the textures extracted from cymbals and rotating surfaces driven by an electric motor by French percussionist Pascal Battus are somewhat comparable to Faegre’s. But here the unyielding alloy of the vibrating surfaces is emphasized so that the instruments’ metallic elements don’t prevent timbres from creating sounds and echoes that reflect back upon one another. Combined with plugged-in oscillations, the mid-range twisting vibrations create a contrapuntal vamping drone that studded with flanges and flapping coalesces into an almost completely solid texture. Although the final “Ouvrage ferme” fills every available sound space even as its undulations confirm the suite’s horizontal movement, it’s the penultimate “Entonnoir tôt” which best explores this relationship. After distant rolls vanish into silence, the exposition is revived as various shades of abrasive and unyielding timbres stacked into a solid mass. Interjected cymbal and surfaces vibrations inflate to bursting and dissolve to linear motion during the evolving interface. Finally a screechy whistle adds another tone layer so that the now balanced program exhibits melodic fragments that along with the horizontal drone hang motionless in the air until the track ends. But the sound inference still remains.

Doubling the number of players, the nine tracks on French duo zBlug’s Lichens posits the symbiotic relationship between fungus and algae as a symbolic description of the textural connection and evolution of Tiri Carreras’ horizontal bass drum, cymbals and objects with Dom Dubois Taine’s programmed keyboard, pedals and potentiometers. Interestingly while the first two-thirds of the disc appears to be concerned with concentrated coloration and reductionist interjections, a change of pace to outgoing occurs in the final selections. Repeated buzzes and echoes, projected by a combination of bubbly squeaks, radio-tuning-like static and rubs against unyielding surfaces predominate as strained textures ping-pong between strains and flanges. Even instrumental produced snorting reflux animal-like squeaks and rocket-launching like whooshes don’t dissect the synthesized crunch and minimal motions. However “Teloschistes chrysophthalmus” and “Xanthoria aureola”, the final tracks, open up the interface. Vibraphone-like plinks and bell-ringing breaks up the droning continuum as more weight is put on lighter impulses. The closing track explodes with siren-like echoes, tongue-slap-like tones, parrot-like whistles and honking buzzes so that a bubbly theme is finally reflected and harmonized with a concentrated drone,

Australian Chris Abrams’ grand piano patterning help make A Thousand Sacred Steps stand out among the other discs. In fact his reflective tonal elaborations and the microtonal pops from the tam tam and cymbals of the UK’s Mark Wastell make the disc sound almost mainstream compared to the others. Still firmly in the free music sector however, the duo’s four brief tracks actually showcase the pianist’s skill as he maintain a connective ostinato, while sliding timbral variations from the top of the keyboard’s sound field to its lowest depths. His affiliation with the percussion tones reaches its zenith on the final “Steps”, where elevated and staccato variants on the pianism he has projected in the beginning, slows down to intersect with Wastell’s constant metal clipping for a high-pitched rapprochement.

Unusual percussion projections call for unique performances . And all of these CDs guarantee that.

—Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Broken: 1. Broken Mirrors Part I 2. Broken Mirrors Part II 3. Broken Mirrors Part III 4. Broken Mirrors Part IV

Personnel: Broken: Brendan Faegre (small drum kit and mono synthesizer)

Track Listing: Cymbale: 1. Âpre voir 2. Indécent indéhiscent 3. Entonnoir tôt 4. Ouvrage ferme

Personnel: Cymbale: Pascal Battus (cymbals and rotating surfaces driven by an electric motor)

Track Listing: Lichens: 1. Usnea florida 2. Cyphelium inquinans 3. Phlyctis agelaea 4. Coenogonium pineti 5. Zwackhia viridis 6. Chrysothrix candelaris 7. Fellhaneropsis vezdae 8. Teloschistes chrysophthalmus 9. Xanthoria aureola

Personnel: Lichens: Tiri Carreras (horizontal bass drum, cymbals and multiple objects) and Dom Dubois Taine (keyboard, pedals and potentiometers w. Max/MSP interface)

Track Listing: Thousand: 1. A 2. Thousand 3. Sacred 4. Steps

Track Listing: Thousand: Chris Abrams (piano) and Mark Wastell (tam tam and cymbals)