Peter Evans / Sam Pluta: Two Live Sets

The most extraordinary music ever presented has elicited the same time-honored "what the f@#k was that?" response. From Elvis (both Presley and Costello) to Grandmaster Flash, Igor Stravinsky, and Charlie Parker, the "shock of the new'" (to borrow a phrase from art critic Robert Hughes) adjusts listeners' criteria for judging a composition or performance, and often times their approach to the listening experience.   

We can add laptop artist/composer Sam Pluta and trumpeter Peter Evans to the above list. They've been doing it for more than a decade now. The pair collaborate in the quartet Rocket Science (with Evan Parker and Craig Taborn), the Peter Evans Quintet, and in this free improvised duo setting. While Evans has garnered critical acclaim for multiple solo trumpet recordings, it is the duo of these artists that undoubtedly pushes the envelope in extremis.

This latest release follows Event Horizon (Carrier, 2014) and Sum And Difference (Carrier, 2011). The music captures two live performances, one on the CD-release from Belgium, and a second (available as a download) from Atlanta. The shock—but let's call it the awe of this duo—is the disintegration of individual sounds. With Pluta's realtime electronics, it is often impossible to determine where Evan's trumpet ends and the laptop improvising begins. Of course, Evans has recorded several solo sessions that extend sound experiments beyond that of Bill Dixon, Wadada Leo Smith, and Rob Mazurek. His innovations, coupled with Pluta's engineered improvisations (not an oxymoron) on laptop, create a sound beyond jazz, new musics, and noise by rethinking melody, harmony, rhythm, and meter. It is part sci-fi and part field recording, if by field recording we mean the insides of Evans' brain and the circuit boards of the computer. The music discovers a sound as ancient as that made by early humans. That is if they had just parked their spaceships.