(Avant-garde, Free Improvisation) Alessandro Bosetti - Michel Doneda - Bhob Rainey - Places dans l'air - 2003, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

Exact Audio Copy V1.0 beta 2 from 29. April 2011
EAC extraction logfile from 4. February 2012, 23:08
Alessandro Bosetti-Michel Doneda-Bhob Rainey / Places dans l'air
Used drive  : TSSTcorpCDDVDW SH-S222A   Adapter: 1  ID: 0
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Null samples used in CRC calculations       : Yes
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==== Log checksum 6023CB3593B30A5E9051BC21E16599B155FC07243304DA84096289AB6C98AA44 ====

REM GENRE Avant-Garde
REM DATE 2003
REM DISCID 3A09C305
REM COMMENT "ExactAudioCopy v1.0b2"
PERFORMER "Alessandro Bosetti-Michel Doneda-Bhob Rainey"
TITLE "Places dans l'air"
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The prospect of listening to a trio of soprano saxophones will make some of you cringe. After all, this instrument can turn into a head-drilling implement -- let alone three. But Placés dans l'Air (literally: "placed in the air" or more elegantly "placed in space") is gentle on the ear, despite its high demands in terms of listening attention and open-mindedness. There are no endless circular-breathing tirades, no screeching solos, no out-breathing contests. Alessandro Bosetti, Michel Doneda and Bhob Rainey join forces to produce soft sound-oriented (as opposed to note-) drones, interrupted by short silences. The dynamic range is wide and includes some startling outbursts.
The album presents a single 40-minute improvisation ...... The musicians' high level of concentration is what sucks you in at first. Then comes the quality of the interplay and the sheer beauty of the complex music that unfolds. The album brings to mind John Butcher, Xavier Charles and Axel Dörner's The Contest of Pleasures, also released on Potlatch. The work of engineer Pierre-Olivier Boulant is described as a "subjective stereophonic recording," which to this reviewer's ears sounds very much like a binaural recording where the wearer is moving around the musicians. It helps blur the distinctions between the three saxophonists. Changes in sonic perspective makes it very difficult to trace back individual contributions, forcing us to focus on the music as a whole. .....

Something of a Soprano Summit for the non-idiomatic avant-garde, Placés dans l’air is a single lengthy improvisation created by Alessandro Bosetti (best known, perhaps, for his participation in the group Phosphor), Michel Doneda and Bhob Rainey, the latter two being among the more extreme exponents of the instrument. There is a fourth key member, however: Pierre-Olivier Boulant, credited for “subjective stereophonic recording”. Given Doneda’s previous penchant for recording sessions done outdoors, on mountainsides or in cavernous, vacant factories, I’m guessing that Boulant’s contribution involved moving the microphone(s) during the performance so that a given musician’s sound would subtly rise and fall in the mix. The room ambience is quite apparent in the first few seconds and remains a presence throughout. For added enjoyment, the interior of the CD booklet is a stereoscopic photo of the room (one presumes), which, if you know how to properly cross your eyes and focus, provides a very nice effect.
The music produced is a bit more problematic. Not surprisingly, there is an immensely wide range of techniques employed by the trio, from breathy flutters through wrenching screeches through the quiet tapping of keys. At times, the pure sound achieved is impressive, even breathtaking. What’s lacking is a sense of concept, of wholeness. They too quickly jump from one point to another, generally refusing to pause and listen, to more deeply investigate a given sound area. There are exceptions to this, to be sure. In the fourth track (tracks are delineated despite its being a single performance), the musicians remain very subdued for the most part, finding common ground in breath tones and weaving a substantial, solid and organic quilt, even as they discreetly create complex overblown squalls that mingle enticingly with the ambient rumbles of a passing motor engine. Indeed, from that point on, the disc grows increasingly cohesive; perhaps it simpl y took some time for the musicians to gauge each other. When, toward the end, the players create sounds that are almost indistinguishable from wind whistling through fissures in the warehouse walls, it attains the beautiful aspect one had hoped to hear throughout. It’s an interesting, sometimes compelling recording, maybe more for the potentialities glimpsed than the final result but still well worth a listen. It’s rare enough that these sorts of problems are even considered, much less tackled.

"..... lronically, or perhaps by design, Placés dans l'air resembles the sound of machinery. Scale and chord studies à la Marcel Mule have been done away with. This barren, unforgiving landscape is not without its beauty, but also without the amenities and conveniences of home.
This manifestation of posttonality, instead ofdensely packing explosions of possibility, retums compositionally to plainchant; startling enough, but consider mat the trio in large part replaces tone (which in plainchant ain't all that much in the first place) with inhalations and barely audible squeaks, and further that saxophones sound like the trumpet of Hautzinger, and we have a peek into both the advanced state of appropriation and its place in musical creation.Plainchant exorcises Placés dans l'air of any sudden moves or secular, libidinous sentiment. The saxophones are brought to edge of their designed abilities at a deliberate, plodding pace. Effete and lofty, yet dilute and dynamics-free, the music demands a fetishist's love of the saxophone and fascination with the tiny and subtle. The drama is visible to anyone willing to endure expanses of silence and inaction while looking througb the microscope to see it all unfold. Long, drawn out, carefully sounded harmonics induce visions of those Tibetan prayer bowls mystically appointed liberals adore. Despite the misty, airy nature, one is always reminded of mechanization. Anticipation of an album with lots of whistling and lisping, harmonics and nontonal blowery couched in dramatic silences does not go unfulfilled.As a work it is more a symptom of the larger capitalist dehumanization process at work, among which there are nevertheless resident syntax and avenues of idiomatic invention.
As with the move from great analog video equipment to primitive digital equipment, Bosetti et al. are dealing with a new technology, a new aesthetic, a new engine, a new way of doing things. The centrality of these sounds are unique to these times - or certainly the acceptance and incorporation of them is new - as they are the stuff that hom players used to practice away from, that which used to be synony-mous with necessitaûng a second take. Bosetti, Doneda and Rhainey do not have extra tendons in their embouchures that Bechet or Coltrane didn't. Instead, the world, how and to whom its riches have been allocated, its declining ecology, and what has passed beneath the musical bridge up to this point are what influence the creation of these sounds in this way and this stratagem of doing things."

Le saxophone soprano, si justement réputé capricieux, a été l’instrument d’expression privilégié de quelques-uns des plus grands créateurs de ces dernières décennies. Aussi cette rencontre de trois sopranos s’annonce-t-elle d’emblée comme un redoutable défi. Elle offrira un démenti à nombre de ceux qui croient trop facilement que tout a été dit, que la recherche musicale est épuisée.
Ici, les protagonistes redoublent de créativité pour produire un nouveau vocabulaire musical, une nouvelle syntaxe. Leur expression basée sur le souffle, cette "mise en vibration de l'air" revendiquée par Michel Doneda, est aussi une stupéfiante mise en jeu de l’intériorité. Un art qui s’adresse donc à tous.

Michel Doneda - soprano saxophone
Alessandro Bosetti - soprano saxophone
Bhob Rainey - soprano saxophone