By Stuart Broomer
Since the release of Eight Duos, another LP of Beins’ duets has
appeared, Meshes of the Evening with violinist Angharad Davies,
recorded a year earlier at Ausland Berlin. The quality of concentrated
attention and empathy is at the highest level throughout the two side-long
duets, each a kind of mini-suite in which there are brief pauses between
improvised movements” of varying length.
Side One, “Meshes 1”, proceeds as a kind of suite, with a shared
attentiveness so profound that they might have had a conductor. The opening
passage, some 4 ½ minutes, emphasizes high-pitched metallic tones, scraped,
struck metal percussion and sustained upper-register violin pitches. The
second passage emphasizes an assortment of mostly lower-pitched percussion
that has something of the quality of a construction site, no jest or slight
intended, just an on-going awareness that, if the right distance and
perspective are applied, construction sites might yield sonic masterpieces,
though very rarely this good. The third episode is marked by very high,
whistling harmonics that involve both musicians (the listener’s temptation
to ascribe much of it to the violin is corrected when the violin enters
with a lower register melodic figure as the whistle continues).
Meshes 2 presents another episodic sequence, rich in
unpredictability. Within its opening moments, Beins’ percussion gives the
impression of a person drumming inside a large metal drum (the industrial
kind), the sound muffled and set against the subtly inflected, repeated
single tone of the violin. There are moments here when Davies might suggest
a saw, Beins too, but an electric one, and there are times when, again, the
constructivism seems literal, when the sounds of the duo seem like they
might be literally building something, not an ethereal work of free
improvisation but something as concrete as a wooden structure, say a cabin
or a shed, art achieving the focused attention of unattended, practical
activity (which, in a significant sense, it is). There are beautiful
sequences here in which Davies sounds like she is wandering through a
village under construction, yet one in which every cabin and garage is
sentient, every hammer and wrench is sentient, inviting, supporting,
engaging the wanderer. By the conclusion, the two musicians barely exist as
independent entities, each part an immediate complement to the other, to the
degree that effect and cause are simultaneous.
The two sides of the disc achieve a kind of ideal, a music that is both
fully conscious of its parameters, peregrinations and potentialities and
yet also suggests the possibilities of chance, an intense creativity that
is somehow so casually practiced that listeners might feel themselves
contributing something of its strange beauty, its complex and allusive
organization, its genius that presents itself as common occurrence. An
extraordinary recording.