#exotic instruments

Lee and Halvorson are old friends, but while they’ve played together informally over the years they’ve never recorded before. This session was a bit of a dare. Lee invited Halvorson, who has spent most of her professional career playing a big hollow-bodied electric guitar through a fairly stable array of pedals, to come on down to the studio and play what he gave her. And while Lee’s showed up to plenty of other people’s sessions toting a guitar or a saxophone, he dug deep into his closet of curios for his own. He played antique flutes, chalumeau (Renaissance clarinet), soprillo saxophone (you didn’t know there was something higher than a sopranino?), and a common garden variety melodica.  And he gave Halvorson an 18-string harp guitar, a 6-string banjo, and an old Gibson acoustic. Each player picked up an instrument, they improvised, and then afterwards Lee fileted the good parts out of their jams.  

There are plenty of novel sounds on display. With its microtonal tinge and woody resonance, “Seven of Strong” sounds like a bleak campfire reverie played on Harry Partch’s invented instruments (none of which are on the record). The strings on “Potomogeton” reach impossibly low, and then leap up into a higher register like a flock of hungry birds chasing a flute-puffing prey. And the soprillo sax’s high, blurry tone pushes into places no familiar woodwind can go on “Rock Flowers,” almost obscuring the uncommon density of the strummed banjo. But the liner notes don’t break down what’s played track by track, and most likely the more you listen the less you’ll want to try. Instead, you might notice how quickly Halvorson seems to find a way to sound like herself when confronted with a totally alien signal chain, or how sturdy and graceful Lee’s lines are. His edits are well hidden, but one suspects that they have a fair bit to do with the cohesiveness of this record’s 15 mostly short-ish pieces. This music stands at least as much for the elegance of its construction as it does for the freakiness of the instruments used to make it.