The eight-piece ensemble called Phosphor is something of a supergroup of Berlin-based improvisors of a generation born circa 1965. AMM is a likely reference-point, but I’m mostly struck by the contrasts between their aesthetics: Phosphor’s concentration on sound-as-event and on noise eliminates the processual, poetic quality of an AMM performance, in favour of a bleak and arbitrary soundworld largely defined by the shifting balance of static, held sounds and arbitrary, puncturing interventions. Even by the trompe l’oeil standards of free-improv, it’s remarkably hard to tell at any given moment how many people are playing and what instruments they’re using. Trumpeter Axel Dörner is already legendary for this kind of sonic extremism, and indeed there’s not a single sound on the album I can assign to him with any certainty. Presumably, like soprano saxophonist Alessandro Bosetti and tuba-player Robin Hayward, he is responsible for the stretches that sound like a gas leak or the workings of a furnace or boiler-room. (The other players are: Burkhard Beins, percussion; Annette Krebs and Michael Renkel, guitars; Andrea Neumann, “inside-piano, mixing desk” – the former, I gather, is the disassembled innards of a piano; and Ignaz Schick, electronics.) The opening track here is as abrupt, loud and annoying as John Zorn could wish, but the album thereafter moves increasingly to the quiet end of the scale; by the end, one is left with a muted backdrop of stroked metal and steady breathing just barely stippled by the other players. I find it easier to be impressed by the album than wholly satisfied by it; nonetheless, aficionados of the more rarefied end of improv will want to check it out.

Rouge Gris Bruit is no less demanding but to my mind yields more rewards. Pianist Sophie Agnel is matched with Lionel Marchetti and Jérôme Noetinger, who make use of a wide array of electronics, including manipulated microphones and loudspeakers. Though the liner notes are not very forthcoming about the way the music was created, the trio’s improvisations appear to have been further shaped and morphed in the studio by Marchetti’s editing. It’s a music that makes striking use of aural perspective. Across a background wash of out-of-focus electronics or detuned radio burble, crisp and sometimes violent exchanges shoot like comets. Agnel’s clipped phrases are often very widely spaced, and on occasion wobble disconcertingly, as if being shaken back and forth. The piano is sometimes right in front of you, but just as often sounds like it’s playing on a distant radio. As with Phosphor, conventions of musical dialogue and interaction are almost completely displaced, though there are flashes of wit and the whole thing is anything but austere. Rather than as “free improvisation,” this needs to be listened to as a sonic artifact, possessing an indubitable but almost alien internal logic. Excellent.

Nate Dorward

Coda, July/August 2002