Catalan sax player Albert Cirera and Polish pianist Witold Oleszak are determined to deconstruct all we know, conceive or imagine about the musical legacy of the duo of a reed instrument and a piano. Both are also committed to construct anew a fresh aesthetics of such duo, in their very own personal premises, procedures, vocabularies, grammars, idiomatic contours and even acoustic particularities.
Cirera employs what now are already common, extended breathing techniques but he also puts objects inside the saxophone hood, a beer tin can or a vibrating dildo, and sometimes he also disassembles the reed instrument and plays on its disjointed parts. Oleszak plays on ruined pianos or prepares the piano in order to radically transform its natural pitches, so it would go back to a pre-musical sound world enabling him to invent music as if the mother of all arts never existed.
The nine free-improvisations captured on «Terra Plana», recorded by at Radio Poznań on October 2017, suggest delicate architectures of sound, space and motion, with great focus on dramatic, sometimes even muscular, furious and loud interplay and arresting, otherworldly details. Cirera and Oleszak act as two mad sonic scientists in search for new forms of sounds and their timbres, sonorities and resonant qualities in the unfamiliar terrains of a faraway, desolate ancient-futuristic planet, as the title one of the improvisation, «La futura antiga terra», implies. Both sound like nothing else, not even their own previous projects, totally possessed by the radical concept of their meeting and the art of the moment, feeding only on their own and the other’s output, but eventually reaching a peaceful and quiet destination on the last, «Terra plana».
The brave ones who would follow Cirera and Oleszak may explore too challenging but highly rewarding listening experience.
Eyal Hareuveni
Albert Cirera (ts, ss); Witold Oleszak (p)
