What we wrote at the time…

Angharad Davies is one of the most promising improvisers in the UK the moment. Her work for prepared violin is stunningly beautiful, a delicate and ethereal evocation of ghost tones that, for all its restraint, is seething with passion. And her performance with her brother Rhodri at the recent Sotto Voce fest in London was one of the best things I’ve seen in ages. And in a way, it was strangely reminiscent of the great Japanese avant garde composer Tōru Takemitsu in it’s gritty texture, organic but abstract sound colours and short fractured juxtapositions of sound, complete in themselves and interspersed in half breaths, which made for a sort of dynamic flux in the improvisation that allowed sounds to be constantly reborn in new relationships. Honestly, it was just fantastic, I don’t know what else to say.

Tisha Mukarji plays the inside of a piano, coaxing alien runs of oddly sonorous sounds, plucks and tones by rubbing, bowing, scratching and generally setting about the internal frame and strings of the piano, creating a sound that jars and then ebbs with the timbral clang of struck metal, the bowed sigh of vibration.

Andrea Neumann’s inner-piano (the liberated innards of strings, resonance board and metal frame, mic’d and sometimes manipulated with electronics to aid in the excavation of microscopic sounds) is an inspired and personal feat of instrument building. And I guess it’s successful not just because it allows Andrea to conjure an impressive spectrum of sounds, (from knackered agricultural machinery, the thrumming drone of a head inserted in a ventilation duct, clattering daisy wheel printers, far away church bells), but because it is so fully an instrument, which she uses to her own conceptual or artistic ends, rather than merely investigating the possibilities of the instrument in itself.