Alister Spence / Tony Buck: Mythographer

Duo recordings, no matter what the particular instrumentation, are able to showcase musical mind-melds. Two artists conversing, trading and extrapolating on each other's ideas. Pianist Alister Spence and drummer Tony Buck try the format on for size with Mythographer.

This spontaneous, one-day-session recording opens with "Dry Wood Talking." It sounds as if the talking is being done with sleigh bells in the beginning, in a tune that unfolds in a searching-for-the-center mode.

"And Yet She Turns," clocking in at near 23-minutes is like the late night sounds of a city in a rain storm. The rain pelts down then wanes into trinkles. Buck's drums might be the closing of a dumpster lid as the city trunk prepares to lift the metal box and empty its contents. The sparse beauty of the music shifts from whispers to the rattles of a bamboo wind-chime on the balcony of a third-floor apartment.

The experience is free, in an approachable sense, with both artists drawing from deep experiences and utilizing penetrating abstractions, noise (that never seems random), spacious moments of reverie, and compelling, often wistful soundscapes.

"The Extent To Which We Still Need Beauty" opens with a tolling that seems to predict doom—a repeated dark chord on the piano and scattershot drums. "Free jazz" often includes unlistenable cacophonies. This tune—indeed, the entirety of Mythographer—instead embraces beauty and form, much in the way that pianist Satoko Fujii—with whom Spence has toured and recorded—creates sounds by searching and creating in the moment, in an "anything goes" state of mind.

"Curious Terrain" is a clattering journey, a jaunt through an alien landscape, frenetic at first, then shifting into a more deliberative sort of stalking, under the influence of novel visions expressing themselves from all directions—the cries of an elephantine presence, the ominous clatter of tribal drums, the subtle vocalization of an otherworldly feline creature, family and species unknown.

"Put To Sea" closes the album with a sense of mystery, a sense of tomorrow's myths forming just beyond our current understanding.