Two primary sensibilities characterise this remarkable album featuring six pieces by Patricia Alessandrini & Marco Fusi. The first is intimacy, conveyed in the close, careful, sympathetic way Alessandrini and Fusi approach and interact with one another’s sounds. The other is tactility, a pronounced sense of not merely touch but an almost physical – at times, muscular – manipulation of the sounds from Alessandrini’s electronic feedback and Fusi’s violin and viola d’amore. Together, they feel their way in real-time through sculptural explorations of what’s possible when these two worlds meet.
Not merely meet, though, but fuse. From the start of opening track ‘Adjoining, Touched’, it’s often tough to say where acoustic and electronic begin and end. Quickly, therefore, we regard the two sources as one voice. There’s the sense of a drone, a useful point of reference in what is an initially strange soundworld, filled with friction (from Musi stroking the FeedBox, their portable performance instrument). Tones pulse and waver, aloof for a time, more forceful later, and suddenly there’s a low, rather edgy pseudo-bassline that suggests almost a Baroque moment. And it’s gone, passed by into something more uncertain, something that shimmers, moving with smooth, balletic grace.
The title piece, the longest on the album, injects an ominous air into the performance. Like a cross between a stringed instrument and something more dangerous, low tones develop a razor sharp edge. Though they settle into sighing phrases over a purring drone, and the duo remains fluid, holding things in check, something like rotating metal appears, the music now gently clangourous, and high shapes squeal. This is not remotely a delicate balance, it’s a bifurcated world, one where stability and uncertainty coexist, and somehow fit together. As if to prove that, an improbable major third materialises, and later, beating pulses and squally notes uncannily evoke the qualities of a human voice. Hard and soft, sharp and smooth, low and high, the polarised landscape of ‘Proximity, Distance’ makes it especially compelling.
Alessandrini and Fusi have a strong instinct for how long to allow these improvisations to continue. At a little over four minutes, shortest track ‘Squared, Boxed’ places heavy wooden clunks (again from the FeedBox) against hypnotic quivering pitches, like out of focus laser beams, which nonetheless seem to burn through into a parallel place where stasis reigns. It’s a nicely effective, enigmatic miniature, one that finds its counterpart in ‘Fractured, Undone’ where, as the title suggests, it’s as if the music is broken, progressing in push-pull fashion as weird little tones are projected and pulled back immediately. Moving in fits and starts, occasionally blurting out frustrated bursts of noise, it’s not until the closing minute that the music seems to find a place of control.
Another highlight is ‘Cracked, Fissured’, where animal-like growls and noises, half in shadow, pulse in the depths while something vague moves high above. It’s tantalising, and as it opens out there’s a sense that the elements here – more free-wheeling than elsewhere – are trying to find focus and definition, figure themselves out. More so than in ‘Proximity, Distance’, there’s a genuine wildness to the musical behaviour – an extended ‘cry’ three minutes in is arguably the album’s most intense sequence – yet this is answered, eventually, by the abrupt appearance of a deep, throbbing stratum that in time quietly bubbles and simmers. It’s soft but potent, and while there’s more razor-edged danger to contend with, the duo arrives at an octave unison, and a few minutes after, an actual unison. Nothing about this is predetermined; there are no foregone conclusions here. So this is an unexpected, highly satisfying outcome to a lengthy period of exploration that often sounds downright precarious, and could convincingly have turned out quite differently. In other words, this makes sense, but not the only sense.
In some ways final track ‘Removed, Lost’ is a synthesis of what’s gone before. Dry impacts – more striking (literally) than before – and friction play out, stroking and rubbing beside softly sustained tones like cloud formations. This energy becomes channelled into something more internalised, as if Fusi and Alessandrini were focusing on their own actions for their own sake, relishing the raw physicality – the elementality – of them, rather than trying to form something concrete or tangible from them. That seems understandable when, a little under halfway through, a makeshift line (for want of a better word) is crudely fashioned from juddering tones, as if they were trying to carve an intricate sculpture using power tools. Thereafter, the piece develops into a textural collection of notes that buzz and fizz against each other. Breaking apart, releasing more strong, final suggestions at both high and medium altitude, the music seems to falter (fractured again?), not just sagging into lower levels, but seemingly now lopsided, tilted to the left, in a coda that’s as beguiling as it is quietly dramatic.
Released by Sideband Records, Proximity, Distance is available on CD and download.
