Muta - Yesterday night you were sleeping at my place

Sofa
522

This is the first recording by the intriguing trio consisting of Alessandra Rombolá (conventional and prepared flutes), Rhodri Davies (amplified harp and electronics) and Ingar Zach (percussion and electronics devices) and is dedicated to Mazen Kerbaj, the Lebanese artist whose postings from last year’s war zone captivated many. The titles of the disc and tracks are taken from some of his drawings.

The album begins with a jarring, guttural buzz, not the first thing you’d expect from this trio perhaps. It expands to include jangling and clicking and, I believe, some camouflaged flute work (throughout much of the disc, Rombolá’s contributions are enticingly difficult to explicitly discern), creating a rich and vibrant olio. It’s a fine, absorbing twelve minutes, an excellent piece and raises expectations substantially. Unfortunately, that same high level of fascination is never quite attained again. Six of the seven cuts, including the first, are “based on structures” by Zach, the other by Davies. I can’t pick up any real sense of composition here so I imagine those structures are reasonably loose. Nonetheless, I wonder if whatever constraints they imposed might be the source of the relatively drier character of the remaining pieces. They’re not uninteresting, just more arid in a similar sense to what I pick up in, for example, some recent work by Polwechsel. For instance the second track, “Birds wake up, we go to sleep”, pits breathy, non-tonal flute against scratched and rattled percussion with, I’m guessing, Davies doing faint harp manipulations. It’s fine but a bit lacking in gumption, a little too much pure experiment. The drive that powered the opening track, though not entirely absent, is less apparent.

The brief “Dead time” has an effective, eerie flute theme and works well enough as an enticing morsel, but I would’ve liked very much to hear more elaboration. The remaining pieces hover between this approach and that of the second, including the ethereal, barely-there “Coffee and Brain” which stretches out those flute tones into the upper atmosphere like evaporating steam. The concluding percussive track, replete with bouncing ping pong balls, ends matters gently.

For myself, the opening work, “Hamida”, set a very high standard that the remaining music struggled to again achieve, though some of them, and some individual sections therein, are enjoyable enough for themselves. I do like the general idea of this particular combination, both instrumentally and personnel-wise, and look forward to future efforts from Muta that might have some more meat.

sofa music