Label: Self released, 2021
Personnel - Kuba Cichocki: piano; Brandon Seabrook: electric guitar.
The Polish pianist Kuba Cichocki joins forces with the American guitarist Brandon Seabrook in this ferocious, highly improvisatory collection of duets enveloped in a bubble of kinetic energy.
Three of the 21 tracks tracks have the signature of Cichocki, and the opener, “Scribbles” is one of them. Melodically strenuous, expressive and hectic, the music speeds up with an impressive left-hand piano continuum and steep accents. This sort of angular vitality is briefly put on halt for atmospherics but it’s transported to the following number, “Push”, where the stabbing guitar of Seabrook plays with timbre and effects. This is also clear on “Solid”, where torrents of cascading piano notes collide with frantic guitar pointillism and chordal fluxes.
While “Bounce” is driven by contrapuntal rhythmic figures, “Field Trip” clearly leans on warped folk before presenting some ambient washes and playful interplay. Cichocki’s “Rays” seems to have been drawn from danceable electronic music with quiet pauses in-between frictions and a nod to traditional jazz. The responsiveness of the duo here can be compared to “Chitchat (aka The Gloves)”, an ad lib that gets denser in the final section via the eruptive and disruptive distortion of the guitar.
Jagged but interesting, “Spikes” feels like we’re hearing toy music made with percussive prepared piano - sometimes emulating miniature artificial fireworks - and guitar dissonance. In turn, “Vabling” is a bustling, pressurized chamber of timbral and pitch combinations where you can expect murmuring and mantra-like activity.
The briskness is put to rest on the short-lived “Bubbles” and also on the concluding piece, “Breathe Out”, whose gentler temperament comes shrouded in nearly cherubic beauty.
Cichocki and Seabrook are admirably daring in their condensed, hard-nosed duo playing.
B
Favorite Tracks:
01 - Scribbles ► 05 - Field Trip ► 21 - Breathe Out