Shadowglow is a set of twelve improvised duets by two original and versatile musicians, American/Finnish guitar master Raoul Bjorkenheim and Austrian percussionist and drummer Lukas Ligeti, both currently residents of New York. Bay area experimental guitarist Henry Kaiser, who had played and recorded with both of them, suggested the project, and the new Finnish label TUM supplied the means, with excellent sound, detailed liner notes and a beautiful package with constructivist art by Finnish artist Lars-Gunnar Nordstrom.
Bjorkenheim has played with the late Finnish drummer Edward Vesala's ensemble Sound & Fury, led the Sound & Fury off-shoot fusionist Krakatau and collaborated with experimental musicians as guitarist Nicky Skopelitis, trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, bassist Bill Laswell and Ethiopian singer Gigi, and co-leads the Scrotch trio with Norwegian bass player Ingebrigt Haker Flaten and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love. Ligeti, son of modern composer Gyorgi Ligeti, has played with Kaiser and Wadada Leo Smith's Yo Miles! band, Elliott Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Daniel Carter and a variety of African musicians.
On Shadowglow, Bjorkenheim and Ligeti demonstrate their raw, conversational interplay, their affinity for traditional music from all over the world and "uncompromising experimentalism while aiming for the beauty- rejecting the politics of rejection," as Ligeti explains in the liner notes. Neither is aiming to impress with assured techniques, as one might expect from Bjorkenheim's eruptive guitar solos from the Krakatau era, but to explore new sounds, new combinations, cross-fertilizing each other.
Ligeti's fractured, polymetric drumming patterns on the opening track, "Into Fall" are similar to those of drummer Jim Black, but Ligeti is an original and his playing combines jazz sensibility with a wide array of influences, from West and Central Africa, China and Korea. Bjorkenheim uses different guitars - a prepared one, a Tri-sonic steel guitar, a custom made electric viola da gamba and a 12-string, and his playing moves from atmospheric soloing to metal hammering on the long, dancey track "Niagara Mohawk." He touches on African blues on the lovely "Rain Turns Red Gold," pays tribute to Madagascar virtuoso guitarist D'Gary on "Fountain Jewel," and even acknowledges Coltrane with a spastic solo on "Duoyell."
Some of the duets, of course, are not as successful as others. "Shed and Torn" wanders between strange sounds from the electric viola da gamba to conventional bass playing to percussion sounds that try to imitate the gimbri string instrument of the Gnawa, leading to listener exhaustion from the high speed global references. But that is the exception. Bjorkenheim and Ligeti created a fascinating work, full of imagination and real, spontaneous joy.
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