The spiriting away of a certain small few fatal peripeties wreaks cruelty on a logical order of continuity and causation during Osso Exotico's collaboration with conceptual artist and percussionist Z'ev. A single forty-five minute piece cuts clear through such a sheath; an initial proverbial beating of its butterfly wings soon brings about a full-fledged hurricane of action, a testament to the material immanence, definitive chaos, and ubiquity of sound.
Metallic and stringed instruments are at first bowed while the flexible body of organ is moved. From here the music is palpably out on a limb, always refusing the easiest path. The rigor and fragility of these opening moments is combined with a perversely unyielding clarity, as Osso Exotico and Z'ev run together in sinewy, entwining tentacles of rhyth-melodies, with no one player leading, even as rapidly accumulating organ energy, complex bass bowing, and persistent, pounding drums are all thrashing in different directions. It's ascension is a rending, a powerful careening out of control whose thrust calls out a reality of space and time of which it is the negation. And, at its zenith, everything coalesces into a deep, richly detailed pool of sound into which the listener is drawn. As a disciplined exercise in trance-like states, though, it's only a limited solution. An entire retinue of high and low frequencies, white-capped by bray-like textures are wrapped around grainy layered drones. During the succession of these moments, which seem an extension and regulation of that which came before, a sense of stasis and the unfolding of some intense and mysterious cosmological drama are simultaneously conveyed.
There is about all of this a clear respect for the enigmatic quality of the incidence. The music, with its intense internal arguments and clashing directions, springs more from the necessity of communication than communication already formed. This adds further credence to its authoritative and episodic dimensions. Each of the players seem of an enduringly creative mind, exercising their powers collectively and damning the consequences.
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