Back to work with a decidedly resigned sigh today and sure enough it took about half an hour for me to all but forget the lovely break I had last week. Ah well, you’ve had a week without my moaning, the holiday is over for all of us.

So as promised I wanted to do a bit of a first for these pages tonight and review an album that has already been reviewed here. Last week for his guest post Simon Reynell wrote about Neptretrganost, a CDr jointly released by Zavod Sploh in conjunction with the L’innomable label by the Slovenian/Japanese, Double bass/percussion duo of Tomaz Grom and Seijiro Murayama. Grom was one half of the TILT group that released a disc on L’innomable a couple of years back, while Murayama currently seems to be appearing on a new CD every other week.

Simon’s review of the CD intrigued me in that it raised the age old questions about the importance of instrumental craftsmanship, but also because he compared the CD to Bestiaries, the recent Cathnor release by Patrick Farmer and Dom Lash, another all acoustic bass/percussion disc. He made the point that while technological advances have changed improvised music in recent years, and while these developments are crucial for the continued growth of the music, they aren’t always necessary. Acoustic instrumentation can still produce inventive, forward thinking music. At the risk of being accused of “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” tactics I would suggest that the new batch of releases on Simon’s own label point us to this (seemingly obvious to me) conclusion.

Anyway, Neptretrganost is a really nice CD, a deceptively varied album of five tracks that range between the near-silent textural whispers that can be found on Bestiaries to a groaning, droning bowed work-out to the thoroughly talkative, busy and sprightly closing track. The skill of the musicians is indeed very clear throughout here. Although both use only very simple means for creating their sounds they conjure up quite an array of styles and sounds, with Murayama’s trademark scrapes and brushing easy to pick out, but used at different intensities throughout, Grom shifting from pizzicato plucking and clicking to rich bowed tones via grey hissing textures and jazzy fingerpicked semi-melodies. Irrespective of the syles used, or the skill of the musicians though, this CD, across all five of its tracks is, for me, all about the communication, the public conversation between these two musicians, who i am guessing may have struggled to communicate easy through conventional language, but sound incredibly close and intertwined here.

It would be a gross generalisation to do so, but you could at a push say that the music moves from quieter, more textural areas early on the disc to the more jazzy rough and tumble of the closing section. The music then seems to run parallel to how a conventional relationship between two people might progress, beginning quite tentatively, serious, thoughtful, weighing each other up, before eventually coming to the flowing, humorous banter of the later stages. It almost feels as if trust grows between the two musicians as the disc progresses and things relax and blossom into not necessarily better music, but certainly more fluid and unrestrained. I’ll probably now find out that the last track was recorded a few days before the earlier pieces, such is my record with this kind of thing, but nevertheless this is how I hear the music’s progression.

One of the simplest, perhaps purist forms of enjoyment to be found in group improvised music is the direct interaction between the two or more personalities playing. The instrumentation doesn’t really matter here. Even if we don’t like the sounds produced we can still follow the interplay, the conversation, the ways the musicians found to respond to the actions of one another. This is what Neptretrganost is all about for me, no concern for particular styles or aesthetics, just for the immediate discourse at the time and place of the recording. When this is in place, and the musicians work together as they do here, I really don’t care what they are playing.