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Vanishing Point 1 & 2 offers a kind of audio document of AirSculpture's November 2011 regional tour of the USA... and with track titles such as "Infinity Halt", "Jersey Greys" and "Necrophone", it must have been a strange holiday. While Vanishing Point 1 (80'31") presents music from various stops at radio stations and elsewhere, Vanishing Point 2 (109'50") features the recording of AirSculpture's 12 November 2011 performance at The Gatherings Concert Series in Philadelphia. With its two epic main tracks, plus the encore, this album is a wonderful example of this trio's talent for spontaneous composition within the context of an improvised live performance. In a brace of free improvisation AirSculpture flaunts angelic harmonies, just as easily as they mine subterranean frequencies - a faculty which enables unexpected excursions. Either in the restrained propulsion of a slow shuffle, or a whirlwind of sequencer patterns bristling with electrical current, this music's pulse sets the pace of thought. Reverberant Mellotron flutes, horns and strings light out in expressive fanciful flights. Deployed alongside rounded synthesizer leads, their lines solo, then meet and intertwine, in a keening consonant concord. All the while, sonorous passages are building their message above a rumbling motorized meter. But it is more than these musical elements that captures our imagination. From the primitive utterances of a minimally defined netherworld, to charged focused performances of melodic and rhythmic flight, the two volumes of Vanishing Point feature works of passionate intensity, music that could hardly be contained within the room in which it was being played.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 6 October 2016 |
