This CD is one of the most radical issues I’ve heard in a good while, i.e. radically minimal, radically withheld, under the breath, radically twiddling thumbs!

I’ve heard a few CDs with these guys before, and they’ve always been very interesting and musically ingenious, like Left & Right on Pax PR90227 and Wires & Wooden Boxes on Pax PR90252, and also with other musicians on rev.99’s CDs on Pax; turn a deaf ear on Pax PR90251 and everything changed after 7-11 on Pax PR90255, and Infante himself has been heard on a multitude of CDs – but again; this one is probably the most barren, the most exposed, like a metal contraption in an electrician’s workshop, cardboard boxes with utensils standing around behind desks, a naked bulb extended from a cord in the middle of the room, overflowing ashtrays, coffee stained invoices and endless rows of cabinets with drawers full of screws and bolts in an order only understood by the proprietor…

This magnificent, austere and turned-away CD was recorded by the duo in Brooklyn after a European tour in early 2002. The introductory text from the labels says that the recording “is a document of the concepts they honed together during numerous performances, train rides, conversations and through collaborations with other musicians they met on that tour. The result covers a varied sonic terrain, incorporating spare, gestural preparations, electronic static, ringing open strings, and delicate piano/guitar interplay, all with an overarching compositional vision”.
That sums it up pretty well, but there are other properties of this art that are important to mention, like the feeling through-out of working with residue, with remains of equipment, of tools; but also of sounds – like Forsyth and Infante catch straying residue of sound in large Japanese bird nets; involuntary sparks from the wiring or unforeseen screeches and static out of speakers and corroded amplifier potentiometers, never actually touching on the music that might be the unheard base, the unheard bottom line of this sparse fluttering and scraping, this rustling about in a fall-blown gust of leaves-like audio, finding their way with torch-lights through a dark apple orchard.
This music is like an absentminded fall receding into moist brushwood and late afternoon mist across the ploughed field, an occasional rabbit folding its ears…

The asceticism of expression makes the listener strangely alert, attentive, all ears, as every sound that actually seeps out of this spidery dew-web attitude takes on so much importance, like the precious words of rage and hope spread on loose notebook papers through dusky basements in the Soviet Union of Brezhnev. All that comes through has a meaning that far exceeds its normal proportions, due to the lack of surroundings, the lack of sound, the general cross-legged or bent-over preoccupation with sparse details of residue…

These sounds of Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth gleam like sign-posts out of the hidden, curled-up dimensions of quantum string theory, lining out an approximate insight into the events of ground zero matter, at the Planck size level, beyond which we cannot yet think… (see Brian Greene: The Elegant Universe: Superstringsd, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for The Ultimate Theory [1999])

The vocals of Infante are themselves soaring, spiraling close by your face, moving around your head in the motions of a blue, glittering dragonfly of late summer, as meditative, as preoccupied with hypnotic inwardness, bending into itself in a gesture of self-analysis, porch-placed, wind-fondled…

Other section of the CD cast a different light on life, like track 4, which spurts trajectories of brilliant, Feldmanesque string vibrations, pointing out like knitting needles out of a ball of yarn, with which the kitten plays, reaching out his paw carefully, retreating, approaching, big eyes!

The blending of residual electronic (like static out of guitar amps etcetera; not actual electronic music) and instrumental and concrete sounds, spaced out in something that I would call silence – silence as a general place of birth of sounds – have me thudding and bumping, ear vise (ear wise?) down the tilting plane of this sound walk, as I make my way through the brush, pushing sharp branches and twigs to the side, to get to that rusty water pump at the overgrown and mossy remnants of an 19th century farmhand cottage, where, in this music, the forlorn and forgotten thoughts of the long since passed away inhabitants still swirl around the almost untraceable little mounds of kitchenware and rotten away furniture down in the soil around the outline of the old foundation of the building, the area reclaimed by nature since many decades…

Shapes of things rise in the music, pot and pans and kitchen utensils of all kinds that once had their purpose, but now dance a desolate dance through the shaman sounds of Forsyth and Diaz-Infante, celebrating the universal fact that all places are here, all times are now, which makes the 19th century kitchenware vision really heartbreaking, as you get so close to the feelings and thoughts and nowness of people you never knew and never met, who lived a long time ago in some far off land – but all is now, all is here; and the music makes this completely clear to me, the nowness and hereness of everything!

This music is as much hard-core philosophy and psychoanalysis as it is music! You name it, we like it! Marvelous!