MESHES - REVIEWS
Since the release of Eight Duos, another LP of Beins' duets has appeared, Meshes of the Evening with violinist Angharad Davies, recorded a year earlier at Ausland Berlin. The quality of concentrated attention and empathy is at the highest level throughout the two side-long duets, each a kind of mini-suite in which there are brief pauses between improvised movements of varying length.
Side One, Meshes 1, proceeds as a kind of suite, with a shared attentiveness so profound that they might have had a conductor. The opening passage, some 4:30 minutes, emphasizes high-pitched metallic tones, scraped, struck metal percussion and sustained upper-register violin pitches. The second passage emphasizes an assortment of mostly lower-pitched percussion that has something of the quality of a construction site, no jest or slight intended, just an on-going awareness that, if the right distance and perspective are applied, construction sites might yield sonic masterpieces, though very rarely this good. The third episode is marked by very high, whistling harmonics that involve both musicians (the listener's temptation to ascribe much of it to the violin is corrected when the violin enters with a lower register melodic figure as the whistle continues).
Meshes 2 presents another episodic sequence, rich in unpredictability. Within its opening moments, Beins' percussion gives the impression of a person drumming inside a large metal drum (the industrial kind), the sound muffled and set against the subtly inflected, repeated single tone of the violin. There are moments here when Davies might suggest a saw, Beins too, but an electric one, and there are times when, again, the constructivism seems literal, when the sounds of the duo seem like they might be literally building something, not an ethereal work of free improvisation but something as concrete as a wooden structure, say a cabin or a shed, art achieving the focused attention of unattended, practical activity (which, in a significant sense, it is). There are beautiful sequences here in which Davies sounds like she is wandering through a village under construction, yet one in which every cabin and garage is sentient, every hammer and wrench is sentient, inviting, supporting, engaging the wanderer. By the conclusion, the two musicians barely exist as independent entities, each part an immediate complement to the other, to the degree that effect and cause are simultaneous.
The two sides of the disc achieve a kind of ideal, a music that is both fully conscious of its parameters, peregrinations and potentialities and yet also suggests the possibilities of chance, an intense creativity that is somehow so casually practiced that listeners might feel themselves contributing something of its strange beauty, its complex and allusive organization, its genius that presents itself as common occurrence. An extraordinary recording.
- Stuart Broomer, The Free Jazz Collective -
Meshes of the Evening brings together - enmeshes even - Angharad Davies' violin and the percussion of Burkhard Beins. Beins and Davies create a 'slow-release' music, but it's no less intense for that.
Beins' website is prefaced with a quote from Piranesi: 'Every ass can tell the best is always located in between monotony and confusion. The only problem is, where is the center?' and you get the feeling, listening to the music, that what he and Davies are involved in here is an ongoing quest to find that sweet spot. What they discover is an unlikely-sound world in which the sounds of a violin and percussion can forge similar musical shapes. And they're both prepared to set off in whatever direction the other leads them, at one moment dramatic and changing, the next, mantra-like. There are surprises aplenty: in Meshes 2, for example, the music veers off into a passage that could almost have been composed by Bartók.
- Dominic Rivron, International Times -
Welsh violinist Angharad Davies and German multi-instrumentalist, here definitely a percussionist, Burkhard Beins were brought together by blind fate and free improvisation at Berlin's Ausland at the beginning of summer 2022. Three years later, the phonographic documentation of their meeting is provided by Luxembourg's Ni Vu Ni Connu - as usual on a beautiful black disc, as always for a hefty sum of euros. We rejoice like predatory tomcats on a catwalk and happily sit down to listen to the concert, which lasts just over thirty-seven minutes.
The first side of this wonderfully crazy recording seems to be a kind of resonant meditation, the second, on the contrary, is blood and fire of an exceptionally interactive exchange of phonic courtesies. The beginning of the first side is stitched together with long strokes of a wet brush - soaring pillars of metallic resonance from a cymbal, juicy like Eddie Prevost's best actions, stick here with streaks of matte tar flowing from the strings of a cooled violin. It is both a ceremony of controlled noise and unrestrained nostalgia, unbridled romanticism, and enigmatic early music. The story first undulates like a calm ocean, then, carried by Beins' deep drumming and Davies' scream, it leaps into the sky, finally settling into the murmur of dying silence. The beauty of this unique ode to suffering cannot be expressed in any language in the world. The finale flows with a stream of descending melodies, but it has a surprising trajectory, as it is a kind of emotional elation.
The second story seems intriguingly dynamic from the very first note. Mysterious objects dance on the snare drum, as does the bow on the trembling neck of the violin. The artists, like ballet masters, coordinate their movements perfectly, reacting to each other phenomenally, arranging the structure of the sentence even more gracefully and choosing the right direction of escalation. Between the coils of their noisy expose, silence creeps in from time to time, a slight slowdown, a kind of temporary calm. However, the action here follows the action, and the variability of the narrative undoubtedly qualifies as extremely intense. The second part of the piece is even more beautiful, with Angharad opting for creative reductionism, while Burkhard sinks into increasingly dense clouds of acoustic noise. The final stretch again seems like a wild dance, full of emotion on the inhale and anticipation of silence after the final sound, as if it were any kind of solution.
- No Fuck, Trybuna Muzyki Spontanicznej -