Agustí Fernández & Mats Gustafsson – Critical Mass

Psi 05.06

The Mad Swede and the Spaniard Fernández have been moving in similar professional circles for awhile, most recently as members of Barry Guy’s New Orchestra. Critical Mass presents a mano y mano studio encounter recorded summer 2004 in the pianist’s home base of Barcelona. The duo framework is one frequently favored by Fernández as past pairings with the likes of Derek Bailey and the Parkers, Evan and William, demonstrate. But rather than the marathon slugfest one might expect this meeting centers instead on a succession of texture-driven dialogues steeped in extended techniques.

Gustafsson communicates in his usual lexicon of slippery reed pops and tongue slaps, tension and friction sustained by clenched teeth and pursed lips. Fernández spends as much time under the piano hood abusing hammers and strings as he does pounding the keys proper. On the opening track it’s as if he’s typing away maniacally at some monstrous adding machine, serrated metallic ticker tape spooling out with every keystroke. A later segment simulates rusty rake tines dragged across a lattice of tightly-wound bed springs. At another he attacks the strings like a jackboot going to work with a set of heavy iron calipers to extract a confession. Elsewhere tight clusters of barb-tipped notes vie with blustery bursts of overblown baritone, the latter salvos echoing the storybook wolf attempting to topple each pig’s house with typhoon-sized huffs and puffs.

The duo alternates these id-based excursions with others that carry brooding, ethereal content, the spectral tonal patterns of the recital’s fifth part offering one example. Neither man concerns himself with employing his instrument in much of any sort of conventional manner. Gustafsson makes use of the whole of his horn as a percussive device. Mouthpiece, reed, pads, even the serpentine metal tubing that comprises the saxophone’s lower anatomy, all become viable orifices for the escape of rhythmic vibrations and breath. These sorts of percolating displays of embouchure control coupled with precision fingerings are akin in weird way to Evan Parker’s stylized argot on soprano, instantly attributable to the architect and fascinating in their sustained singularity.

The disc’s final piece embodies the closest thing to a free jazz blowout with both men pulling the stops and aiming volley after volley at each other’s corner, the zero hour condition of the title finally reached. The uniform obduracy of these exchanges can prove challenging, but close, open-minded listening pays off by revealing a strong underlying rapport between the two players. And for an enjoyable exercise in dichotomous listening try spinning this back-to-back with, say, Warne Marsh’s Ballad For You or the Brubeck/Desmond duets.

~ Derek Taylor