Like many of Butcher’s albums, Cavern with Nightlife is a musical notebook, offering two very different performances recorded during a 2002 tour of Japan. The first half-hour comprises four saxophone solos recorded in the extraordinarily resonant acoustic of Oya Stone Museum, a huge disused quarry inside a mountain. Butcher is always intent, but never obsessive: he’s a specialist in the fresh start, both between and within improvisations. Sometimes he works with tiny droplets of sound, as if throwing pebbles into a well; other times, he spools out endless, vibrating ribbons of sound, or sets the cavern resonating with a foghorn blast. On “Mustard Bath,” the most striking piece, he sets the ears tingling with a long, flaring trill, before turning to basketball-court squeaks and slidewhistle smears.

The album is rounded out by “Practical Luxury,” a twenty-minute duet with “no-input mixing board” specialist Toshimaru Nakamura recorded in a Tokyo club. This was their first meeting; confronted with Nakamura’s high, wafer-thin drones, clots of static and odd bursts of searing noise, Butcher sounds both fascinated and sometimes uncertain. He sticks to tenor throughout, concentrating on tiny bubblings and frayings, but also engaging Nakamura on his own territory by making use of amplified sax and swooping feedback. The results are spare, exquisite, slightly tentative music – less satisfying than the solo pieces, to be sure, but strangely memorable nonetheless.

Nate Dorward

Coda, March/April 2005