Haiku is the fifth album of the Catalan free improvising duo Duot of drummer Ramón Prats and sax player Albert Cirera. Duot has been working for eighteen years now but still sounds fresh, urgent, and fearless, eager to discover new directions.
The 35-minute, free improvised title piece was recorded at El Teatre de Cal Eril in Guissona, Spain, in March 2024. This piece is comprised of different short pieces, arranged in the natural, free-associative order in which they were recorded, and inspired by the concise form of the Japanese haiku poems (only three lines and 17 syllables). Duot has focused on tying together short ideas and sound images of atomic duration in recent years and Haiku is the first realization of the new approach.
But even without seeking the centuries-old, spiritual wisdom of the haiku poems, Haiku, with its delicate Eastern overtones, mines into Duot’s own wisdom, a product of extensive experience and open, elephantine ears. Duot simply sticks to what it has always been doing, playing as seriously as its lives, without thinking about anything else, listening deeply to each other and following each other, experiencing with extended percussive and breathing techniques, and letting the music carry them. But, somehow, the enigmatic spirit of the haiku poems as well as Prats and Cirera talking about these poems, led Duot to beautiful and unpredictable territories, full of poetic sonic imagination and resourceful invention, and transformed Haiku into a a masterful demonstration of the art of the moment.
Eyal Hareuveni
Ramón Prats (drums), Albert Cirera (saxophones)
