Agusti Fernandez And Peter Kowald - Sea Of Lead (2000)

Considering its inherently percussive properties it’s sometimes easy to forget that the piano is, at heart, a stringed instrument. Spaniard Agustí Fernández gives listeners a far from gentle reminder of the instrument’s familial ties on this conclave with bassist Peter Kowald, recorded back in the summer of 2000. Neither man approaches his instrument from any sort of conventional stance until nearly halfway through the studio recital. The younger Fernández more than holds his own in the presence of the venerable Kowald. And as with his tandem meeting with Mats Gustafsson recently released as Critical Mass (Psi) there are various junctures where Fernández actually steals the show with his aggressive ingenuity and resolve toward stretching (and sometimes snapping) the physical parameters of the piano. The bulk of the disc is dominated by the title piece, a seven-part improvisation that finds the pair regularly placing their instruments in harm’s way through a punishing set of paces. Fernández is a fastidious tonal scientist working primarily under the hood, attacking scrupulously-prepared strings and generating a controlled metallic racket that reflects the plumbic connotations of the disc’s title. There are sections where the conjured noises almost sound electronic in origin. In other places, it’s as if he has reconfigured the physical corpus of his piano into a form approximating cello, bass, guitar, or zither, his snapping turtle tones darting and biting outward from the regularly tortured strings. Kowald answers in kind, sawing and scrabbling with resourcefulness and intensity that rarely lets up over the first several tracks and it’s often uncanny how the two intersect and adapt with split-second celerity. This isn’t overtly friendly or embracive music, filled as it is with harsh atonal collisions and sharp-edged brooding sonorities, but it’s consistently absorbing in terms of the amount of information the two players exchange. The second half of the program resorts to a more familiar approach, with Fernández crafting actual recognizable chordal clusters, but only relenting periodically in the force with which he pummels his keys. Kowald switches to pizzicato, drawing forth a massive tonal breadth that could easily strain the acoustic dimensions of a cathedral-sized venue. There’s even space accorded on “Three Voices” for some of his signature Tuvan-influenced throat singing. It’s these later numbers that truly make the disc a bittersweet listen. Hearing Kowald in such a salubrious setting, reacting to and galvanizing the responses of an improviser cut from the same restlessly exploratory mold, it’s impossible not to be reminded of the chasm still extant by his passing. That improvisers of Fernández’s caliber were able to make music with him to the end and that the results continue to find release in commercially-available form remains something of a saving grace.



Tracks:

*01. Sea of lead part I
*02. Sea of lead part II
*03. Sea of lead part III
*04. Sea of lead part IV
*05. Sea of lead part V
*06. Sea of lead part VI
*07. Sea of lead part VII
*08. Rhizomes
*09. Tendrils
*10. Three voices
*11. Kowald's dream




Personnel:

*Agusti Fernandez: Piano, prepared piano
*Peter Kowald:Double bass









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