Flautist Sabine Vogel provides the many layers of glue that hold together this fascinating foray into the often thorny shadow lands bordering improvisation and composition. There's nothing new about exploring this terrain; many have done it, employing diverse methodologies and achieving varying degrees of success. Vogel's two contributions to Another Timbre's Berlin series are as interesting for what they include as for the restraint with which it all is accomplished.
To pigeonhole Vogel as a flautist is, in a subtle way, to do her work an injustice. For her, the flute is an instrument of possibility, as often ready to emit a tone as a guttural rasp or a meditative flutter. Along similarly exploratory lines, the present disc might be divided into external and internal environments. "Luv" is a study in environmental contrast, bridging the gaps between multiple public and private worlds of experience, examining both with a powerful microscope. If we begin in a fairly open space where plenty of ambience allows each sound to live and move in its own space, we can just as easily move into places of almost no action or externality, as happens nearly halfway through the piece; we are placed in a windy and watery no-time of closely captured but soft timbral transformations, movement across the stereo spectrum providing no actual sense of environment, each sound existing on its own terms and barely breaking the silence's amniotic surface. The members of the Landscape Quartet accompany Vogel on this psychedelic journey. While the recordings were made over two years, they are interwoven seamlessly throughout this examination of outer and inner extremes.
The second piece, "Kopfuberwelle," would not exist as we hear it without the reverberant environment bolstering it, but the various flute and pipe-organ interactions are still recorded with extraordinary attention to detail and perspective. Indeed, it is the sense of space that is palpable before the first high-register whistles begin to trace their knotted paths. Constantly morphing and often microtonal wisps of pitch and timbre bloom against the reflective backdrop of drone and overtone that only a pipe-organ can achieve, all courtesy of Chris Abrahams. The piece keeps it's momentum, the opening C, or thereabouts, gradually gaining upper structures and lower extensions before disappearing, with only its implications apparent in the deepening network of tone and breath. Through it all, Vogel's flutes provide layers of commentary as the sounds slowly initiate, develop and fade. As with many Another Timbre releases, a meditative surface under which many events bubble and seethe makes this a fascinating listen from start to finish.
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