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Bottle Breaking Heart Leap

by Gino Robair & John Butcher

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1.
Bottle Heart 15:57
info
2.
Breaking Leap 14:19
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about

GINO ROBAIR: energised surfaces, blipoo box
JOHN BUTCHER: saxophones - acoustic and amplified

"It starts suddenly, with a frantic sawing sound as if some poor bugger trapped in a coffin and armed only with a nail file is trying to saw their way out. Then it is almost silent, before some metallic rattles and whines disturb the muggy closeness. Suddenly a sequence of fast chirrups burst forth. Have we finally broken free into the biosphere?

This is John Butcher and Gino Robair’s fourth recording as a duo – they also play together in several trios and in the seven-piece John Butcher Group – continually expanding a relationship that started in 1997.

They’re comfortable enough with each other not to stand on ceremony. There’s none of the gentle faffing around that you get on many free improv sessions, that gradual exploration of space and sound that used to signal mutual respect and listening but then became a set of stock gestures. They’re straight into it with gusto, hurtling to the edge of the universe with a dynamic energy.

At points, there’s so much going on that it’s hard to believe there are just two people playing here. Listen out for the bit about five and a half minutes in on the first side, Bottle Heart, when Butcher’s horn starts quacking and squealing as Robair lets rip with sounds that seem more like howls of a pained mammoth than any human instrument.

Towards the end of that first side we’re treated to a frenetic outburst of scrunching and metallic and scratching from Robair, which is strafed by Butcher’s scrambled gargles. We seem to have dropped down to micro scale, the sounds of an insect village. Soon after, we’re back in the room, with groovy tom rolls and wide open skronky blasts. I like this section in a kind of Cab-Calloway-meets-AMM way, but it’s soon dismantled in a cacophony of brassy crashes.

It’s this mystery and drama that helps make the record so enjoyable. Basically, Bottle Breaking Heart Leap is a sax and percussion album whose defining characteristic is that it sounds utterly unlike a sax and percussion album. Even by the standards of free improvisation, which prides itself in subverting those old, rather staid, jazz configurations of duo, trio and so on, this is an adventurous record, at times resembling a seething cyborg ecosystem made up of many separate yet interdependent parts.

Thrillingly out-there stuff."

Paul Margree - Louder than War.

credits

released October 3, 2017

Recorded:
2013 by Simon Reynell at
Left Bank, St. Margeret of Antioche, Leeds.

Cover Photo: Tom Djil.

Originally released as an LP on alt.vinyl.

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about

John Butcher image

John Butcher London, UK

Improviser, Composer, Saxophonist.
Born in Brighton.
Lives in London.

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