New York’s Fridman gallery re-activates its record imprint with this absorbing collaboration between Ben Vida (fresh from his stunning 4 hour 'Reducing The Tempo To Zero’ opus for Shelter Press), and noted composer for dance, Marina Rosenfeld - whose collaborative album with Warrior Queen and Okkyung Lee 'P.A. / HARD LOVE’ is to this day one of the most brilliantly singular LP’s we’ve stocked. RIYL Jim O’Rourke, Laurie Spiegel, Terre Thaemlitz, Rashad Becker.
Working in the space between improvisation, sculpture, sound installation, and experimental composition, both artists’ skill for creating highly descriptive yet elusive sound structures is at its illusive and ephemeral best across both pieces, from the strangely penetrative metaphysical point of view explored in ‘Any Landscape’, to the sprawling tendrils and searching electronic filament of ‘Branches’ that feel like the process of mycelium or spores finding a way into the cracks between the decayed concrete, glass and steel of crumbling urban environments.
Drawing on decades of combined experience, ‘Vertice’ unfolds along two 20 minute pieces with a natural grasp of more delicate sounds opening out in vast imaginary spaces. Their palette of field recordings, vocals, keys and electronics is placed at the service of an elusive underlying schematic, snipping away at the ligature of logic until their sounds are released into space as clusters of animated insectoid patterns. It resembles patches of gently overgrown vegetation, like rooftop gardens or thickets of mossy growth overhead.
In scale and fractured design, it comes to describe a vertiginous sense of detachment from reality, probing and challenging the listener’s proprioceptive senses with cool but heady arrangements of free-floating, aerial, and seemingly unmetered tones and dabs of vocal that appear to describe a slow and purposeful movement above and around our architectural surroundings.
https://boomkat.com/products/vertice
https://fridmangallery.bandcamp.com/album/vertice
