«Collaborative differences can forge some serious alchemies,» says New York-based alto sax and cornet player Patrick Brennan on his spontaneously composed dialogues with Portugese experimental guitarist-sound artist Abdul Moimême. Brennan and Moimême recorded seven duets for their debut album as a duo, «Terraphonia», at at Namouche studios, Lisbon, in April 2018.

Brennan’s projects interfaces flexibly jointed compositional matrices with polyrhythm & collective improvisation, collaboration with Morrocan Gnawa musicians and exploration of multilinear orchestral conceptions via his solo saxophone project rōnin. Moimême studies saxophone with Brennan in the mid-nineties, but now experiments on the timbral and textual expanse of the two laid down, prepared electric guitars and objects attached to their bodies and strings.

There are indeed many bold attempts on «Terraphonia» to offer a new sonic alchemy here, one with no clear narrative or even building a tension . But more than that, Brennan and Moimême sketch a new and brave space-time continuum where silences, cryptic, fragmented sounds and enigmatic, resonant noises introduce a unique listening experience. While diving deeper into the attentive duets of Brennan and Moimême you may realize how both carefully adapt and soon expand, shape and sculpt the sounds and the inner syntax of each other, creating their own, untimely vocabulary and language without compromising their own sonic identities. Brennan surprises with brief glimpses into melodic veins on pieces like «Nilch’i . Telespire . Nilch’i» and «Mycellerate» while Moimême structures his own version of a melodic drone on «Ndụ Enweghị Ihe Abụọ/No Two» and fascinating, sparse architecture on «Tactiludic».

Eyal Hareuveni

Patrick Brennan (as, cornet); Abdul Moimême (el.g, obj)