Matthias Loibner, Lucas Niggli: Still Storm

If Scottish pop singer Donavan is your only reference to the term "hurdy-gurdy," as in his 1968 hit "Hurdy Gurdy Man," welcome to this extraordinary device for improvisation. This medieval hand-cranked string instrument, which also has keys, is a kind of magic buzzing drone box which is part bagpipes, part violin and part sitar. The Austrian Matthias Loibner is a master musician and, with Keiji Haino, might be the leading proponent of the instrument in jazz and improvised music. He teamed up with Swiss drummer and percussionist Lucas Niggli a few decades ago to perform duo concerts, and Still Storm is their first recording. Niggli is an omnivorous drummer with an appetite for intercontinental percussive sounds. He participates in twenty different ensembles, the best known perhaps being his Steamboat Switzerland, which has released nine discs.

This duo delivers 16 tracks, of which all but one, "Auf Socken," are purely improvised. Maybe it is their longtime collaboration and single mindedness which creates these seamless tracks. Each is complete in itself, as if the two musicians agree 'enough said.' Loibner plucks notes, elongates humming drones, and manipulates sound with electronics as Niggli tinkers with cymbals, metal objects, drum heads, toys, sticks, and chains. The effects are spectral and atmospheric, like a soundtrack to short stories set mostly at half-light, a time when one cannot rely on vision, and perception is extrasensory, i.e. pure magic.