«Transition Zone» documents the first-ever live free-improvised meeting of American cellist-electronics player Fred Lonberg-Holm with Portuguese comrades Abdul Moimême, who plays simultaneously on two electric guitars and Carlos Santos, who plays on computer and synthesizer, and did the cover art. This summit meeting of fearless sonic explorers was captured as it occurred, live at Lisbon’s legendary studio Namouche in May 2018.

The trio plays five extended and quite puzzling drone pieces. Lonberg-Holm, Moimême and Santos engage immediately with strange and unsettling textures, where tense and twisted acoustic sounds blend into industrial and almost alien electronic noises, feedbacks and blips, and vice versa, and together suggest some kind of an auditory hallucination, as Stuart Broomer suggests in his liner notes. «Like a watery echo of an essential but incomprehensible warning, muffling up through the narrow passages of nothingness pinched between the trio’s machinery».

The instant affinity of the three musicians, the great attention to detail and to the accumulative effect of resonant timbres intensify the haunting, psychedelic spirit of this meeting. There are no familiar sounds in these five pieces, no solid ground to hold to, and, obviously, no clear structures or narratives. Just perplexing nothingness, the poetic suchness of arresting sounds that navigate the listener into imaginative and adventurous sonic universes. And the feeling of being immersed in a one-of-its-kind sonic experience that would not repeat itself, but one that has already had an instant impact on the way we experience and hear sound(s), or experience the art of the moment and its transient nature. And, naturally, the power of music, weird as it may sound, to open the listener’s gates of consciousness and offer a transition to some fascinating sonic zones.

Eyal Hareuveni   

Fred Lonberg-Holm (c, elec), Abdul Moimême (g, objects), Carlos Santos (computer, synth)