PHIL MINTON & SIMON H. FELL – The Knowledge Of Its Own Making – CD – HCR08CD

Minton (voice) and Fell (double bass) improvise such that the form and content are not, for the most part, predetermined, instead composed in real-time drawing on, in Fell’s words, their “considerable individual vocabularies and structuring strategies to spontaneously produce unforeseen and unrepeatable constellations of sound with a malleable yet form-aware structure”. The relationship between voice and double bass is complex and subject to change; in the main work on the disc, Knotted Properties, they’re initially impossible to separate, insofar as they seem to embody dual aspects of a single entity, Minton’s whistles and breaths melding into Fell’s glistening, harmonic-strewn tremolandi (oftentimes they don’t even sound acoustic, the strangeness of their combined timbres resembling an electroacoustic soundworld). But this intimately connected interplay is soon questioned when the voice becomes increasingly constricted, as though Minton were struggling to communicate through vocal cords pulled taut. Thenceforth, the duo’s entire relationship is deeply fascinating and full of the most engrossing drama. Summarising it here in no way does justice to the work’s cutting-edge display of improvisational imagination and virtuosity; it is literally breathtaking, and by the end one feels almost as exhausted as Fell and Minton must have been.

Simon Cummings / 5:4