Oblic is the first duo album of French experienced free improvisers – pianist Christine Wodrascka (who has collaborated with Fred Frith, Gerry Hemingway, Daunik Lazro, Joëlle Léandre, Evan Parker, Fred Van Hove, Jean-Luc Cappozzo, and Sophie Agnel) and double bass player Bernard Santacruz (who has collaborated with Lazro, Michel Marre, Stephan Oliva, Barry Altschul, Jim Baker, and Cappozzo), recorded at Studio Laouqué in November 2024. Wodrascka and Santacruz recorded before in other formats.
The nine pieces suggest dream-like, enigmatic and often quite capricious conversations – or dances – between two highly imaginative and opinionated improvisers. These intimate, deep listening yet restless and exploratory conversations visit unpredictable timbral possibilities (obviously, with piano preparations, playing inside the piano, and extended bowing techniques), suggest contrasting and labyrinthine rhythmic-percussive narratives, balance stimulating tension with abstract, fragile lyricism, and pilgrimage toward meditative silence.
Some of the pieces’ titles – «le monstre est sous le lit» (The Monster Is Under the Bed) with its dreamy atmosphere, the almost silent «qui suis je» (Who Am I? ), the stormy «princesse et pirate» (Princess and Pirate), and the contemplative «et si on» (and if we) – inform us about Wodrascka and Santacruz’s state of mind during the recording session. This is a potent and immersive journey into the art of the moment.
French poet and writer Alexandre Pierrepont, who contributed the liner notes, compared their dialogues to a continuous movement in disguise, and borrows the title of one piece to characterize the spirit of the duo’s interplay: «Princess and pirate. Prince and piratess». Pierrepont further observed that the «double bassist and the pianist speak (articulate and disarticulate), play (converse and convert), it’s the same, at the same time and in staggered times that they cross like two needles piercing a fabric – let’s say the Golden Fleece. The two, together and separately, a world in suspense and a world in delirium, and we who listen to them are scattered and reunited».
Eyal Hareuveni
Christine Wodrascka (piano), Bernard Santacruz (double bass)
