Even worse than getting through Christmas is having to pick up the pieces after it. Work consisted entirely of that today and so was exhausting. Oh well, only another 362 days to go… Tonight a review of an album that I wrote up a few weeks back for a proposed short review in The Wire, but as it didn’t happen there here is the same piece made four times longer! This is a strange way of writing. When writing reviews with low word limits I usuallys tart by writing a longer piece and then whittle it down by removing all the usual waffle I tend to add, until it retains just the basic messages. I am oddly doing the reverse here, taking the key messages and adding waffle! As this review started life as half of a review of two different albums by Barry Chabala what I submitted to The Wire on this album was only really one paragraph. Its nice to be able to give it a little more space here anyway.

Bary Chabala is a New Jersey based musician whose music I have mentioned here before. His recent versions of Michael Pisaro’s An Unrhymed Chord composition were excellent. Despite living in an American city, not far from a major metropolis, Chabala actually has found it hard to find sympathetic musicians with which to play and record in person, so several of his releases have been file-sharing collaborative works, made at a distance. The disc I have been listening to today, called The Shade & The Squint is one of these works, and is the second such recording Chabala has released with New Zealand based percussionist Lee Noyes. It would appear from the brief liner notes that the music on the two tracks here were recorded separately, blind, and then layered together. The first track, Yin (The Shade) is unedited in any way beyond the simple layering of the tracks, while the second, Yang (The Squint) is “edited by reduction”

This idea of blind collaboration is certainly not a new one (MIMEO’s sight follows a similar methodology as do countless of other CDs besides) and it is an area that Chabala has played with before, although one previous duo release with saxophonist Phil Hargreaves involved two separate discs, one of each musician that the listener would then take charge of playing simultaneously. Here the goal seems to have been to produce two solid works that stand up as music in their own right, despite the blind recording process. the fact that the two musicians’ know each others’ approaches quite well having worked together before doubtlessly helped this whole process.

On both tracks here Chabala plays guitar, partly cleanly, with picked notes and the occasional strum easily identifiable, but also with some degree of preparation, as often we hear continuous tones, abstract rumbles and scrapes. Noyes is more restrained than I have heard him before, leaving plenty of space in his playing, but still working with firm, forthright sounds for much of the time. The big question then is does it all gel? Would I have noticed if I was not told in advance about the methods of construction? On the whole yes it does all come together very nicely. In places on the first piece the two musicians’ sounds really do feel very much in tandem, and as much as I would like to be able to strut my improv listening credentials and say that I would have known that the piece was not recorded live with both musicians in the same room I must be honest and state that I would never have guessed.

Of course this is not just a recording of two random sets of sounds forced together. Both musicians know each others’ works and have set about playing in such a way that their contributions would fit with most other sounds the other half of the duo might be making. While there is obviously a good degree of randomisation involved here its not as much as we might think. The music on Yin (The Shade) is carefully considered, thoughtfully pieced together improvisation, as close as it is probably possible to get to truly intertwined playing given the geographical split. While never really becoming frantically busy there is plenty going on here, lots to wrap your ears around and some exciting little mini-events to detangle that contain a certain tension of their own, albeit perhaps a partly artificially obtained one.

As good a ride as the first track is, I am really taken with the second piece. I am not entirely certain what “editing by reduction” consists of, but certainly there are a lot less sounds here than on the first piece and a far greater degree of silence. Whether this track was constructed from two similarly recorded tracks to the first piece, which have then had a fair number of the sounds removed, or whether a further degree of compositional editing has taken place I am not sure, but there is a greater sense of importance placed on the sounds we hear. Little moments appear from out of the silence, sometimes from just one musician, sometimes combinations of both, but there is a sense of simple clarity here that I really enjoy and that was less obvious on the busier opening track. I am reminded of the digitally enhanced Sugimoto/Malfatti track on their duo album, where the long silences between events are digitally inserted. The silences on Yang (The Squint) are also digital, but they are not quite as long, and when they are interrupted by events there is much more of a variety of sounds to be heard. Still, this makes for a lovely piece and a rewarding listen. I’m not sure how the musicians undertook the “reduction” process, if it was a collaborative exercise or the handiwork of one of the duo (I suspect the latter) but there is a nice compositional mind (or two) at work here.

All in all a rewarding listen, and one likely to be overlooked as it has only been released on Chabala’s own Roeba CDr label. The other disc it was released alongside, a duo with Daniel Jones is an equally good listen that I will get to over the next few days. It can be purchased here.