Reviews
"This music is like a 45 minute massage for your soul" - A Grateful Fan
"…I wanted to approach this listening experience with few pre-conceptions. I've seen your group in live performance so I know "how" you go about doing what it is you do. Overall I thought the work was remarkable and I truly enjoyed it. Would I listen to it again? most definitely. And, as with any work through which you can "step" by virtue of moving to a selected track, there are certainly specific tracks to which I am very likely to return again more than I might the others- for no other reason than "personal preference" which will vary, no doubt from one listener to another.
Let me throw a couple notions out there: "improv/live" and "improv/archive" and the question of "conventions". Whenever someone attends a Triund performance, they can "see what they get", that is, the performance is not simply that music which is being performed, it is also the implicit "drama" of watching the musicians at work, moving from instrument to instrument, inspiration to inspiration… there's a kind of energy derived of the tension of "keeping the feather in the air" or keeping the music flowing, or working together as musicians to feed and to follow and to move one another from one moment of "recognition" to the next, and then… onward again. As a member of the audience part of the engagement with the music is caught up in this fascination with the tightrope act that is happening before you and your shared desire to see the work become something greater than the sum of its parts or the sum of its musicians endeavours. The dramatic level of "being in the room" of being "part of the drama" is what gives the "live" performance (some of) its power to move us.
An improv/archive doesn't have this going for it, no matter how good the listening environment, or how uninterrupted the listening period. The mixed and mastered CD lives and breathes in the world of - for want of a better choice of words- "the finished product".
This does not mean that the listener, knowing the improvisational nature of the music, is not engaged in that same "feather in the air" listening tension; but that engagement is different, solitary, not as "shared" as the live experience. The "live" nature of this CD is specific to its "real-time improvisational" nature, as opposed to a live "as-performed-before-an-audience" archival variation.
In my view this means that this CD lives in, and will be experienced within, the conventions that one normally associates with studio performed and crafted works.
Regardless of whether the listener has read the liner notes, he or she "has been conventionalized" into bringing certain inherent expectations into this experience of listening through the tracks. Even in this domain, and in the context of these implicit expectations and demands, "Notable Number Nine" fares very well: a remarkable and delightfully engaging feat." - Dan Sexton
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