Angharad Davies & Axel Dörner
A.D.

Angharad Davies     violin
Axel Dörner         trumpet

1. stück un      12:40
2. stück dau    15:04
3. stück tri      14:30

Recorded in Ealing, London, December 2008

Reviews

"There are some instruments, which, if you asked me to name my very favourite musician that played said instrument, I would struggle to be able to think of one name. The saxophone springs to mind, as does percussion, or electronics, there are so many great musicians working with these tools I just couldn’t be pinned down to one name. With the trumpet and violin however, I can do this quite easily. Although there are an awful lot of really great trumpeters out there, I don’t know if there is any one that has consistently given me so much pleasure as Axel Dörner. If naming one trumpeter didn’t take long, then its even easier to pinpoint a violinist. Angharad Davies has, for me, been the most consistently interesting violinist that has crossed my path over the last couple of decades. The difference between the two names above might be their recorded output. While Dörner has appeared on dozens of albums, Davies has appeared on far fewer, a factor being slowly corrected as time goes by, but I think it is still very fair to say that given her ability and standing in the improvised music world she remains under-recorded. So a new duo disc by this pair then, was always going to push the right buttons for me.

The music captures a recording made by Simon Reynell at a West London house in December 2008. It sounds as if the two musicians just sat down and played together, not attempting to adapt their style or technique at all, just playing to see what might happen, drawing on the experience they had of playing occasionally together over the last decade. So the individual voices are there, Dörner at his most muted and breathy, but also completely acoustic, Davies working (I think) completely with the bow, mostly on the strings, prepared at times with small clips, but also bowing the body of the violin so as to find grey tones to match the trumpet’s hiss and hum…

…and in many ways, that’s it, that’s enough of a description of what happens on A.D, as this new release on the Another Timbre label is named. I have a vision in my head that I can’t quite shake, of Dörner and Davies sat in the kitchen, sharing a pot of tea, catching up on each other’s news, before putting down the teacups and picking up their instruments to play together. I don’t see this vision as a negative picture, rather an image of how this music seems to extend normal conversation, its simplicity as a metaphor for verbal discourse betrayed by the ability of the music to go beyond what words might be able to describe- a certain “correctness” about how sounds fit together, a tension produced only by choosing the right sounds in the right places.

I can try and describe the actual sounds used, most of them quiet and non-dramatic in their nature, with the occasional outburst from either player. There is a lot of space, found either in the short silences that stumble into view from time to time, or just where the understated sounds still leave a lot of room for movement. We can always tell the violin from the trumpet, even when neither sounds like either, and so the sense of communication here, the feeling of two people building a delicate structure together in real time is very prevalent. So there are hisses, gentle roars, circular motifs and grainy purring, and that’s just the violin. There are three tracks, which sound to me like they all came from one session, with little gap in between, with the three pieces perhaps even chunks edited from a longer recording. Certainly the parts we hear are uninterrupted sections of music however, any edits just chopped material off of either end of the tracks. Across the three pieces there is a little progression in style and density. The second piece, (titled Stück Dau in amusingly German/Welsh manner) feels like it uses shorter, more markedly punctuational sounds, increasing the sense of urgency slightly, but still remaining calm and considered, as is the trademark of most of the album.

I have justified my enjoyment of CDs over the past year a number of times by just stating that they are great documents of the improvisational process, and here I will simply do this again. I can’t think of any other album at all that sounds close to how this disc sounds, the particular mix of textures and tones is unusual, and yet the sounds themselves don’t matter much- the way they are used, the skilful way they are instantly selected, and the choice of sounds not used are all what make this a fine CD and another real winner for Another Timbre.The trumpet always sounds well in the hands of Axel Dörner, who teams up with Angharad Davies, who plays violin. This is a more 'traditional' improvisation disc, if such a thing exists in the world of Another Timbre. Probably not. But here, at times, we recognize the instruments. The soft scraping of the violin, the trumpet sounds like one, but then, that's only on a few instances. By and large however, these instruments sounds like anything but a violin and trumpet. Especially Dörner is a key player in this corner of the improvisation world and knows how to create the most unlikely sounds from his trumpet - white static noise at times. And all of that without any type of electronic processing. This is also a great disc, also one that requires ones full attention, as at times things move beyond the threshold of hearing. Excellent, concentrated music.”      
Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

“Before hearing any of this series, based on their past performances as instrumentalists and improvisers, on paper the pairing of violinist Angharad Davies and trumpeter Axel Dörner looked as tempting as any. Each of them combines technique with the instincts and experience essential for improvising. The reality proves to be just as good as anticipated. They play it straight, with the separate sounds of the instruments being clearly distinguishable throughout and complementing each other to good effect.

Although distinguishable, each instrument produces some atypical sounds. In a stunning performance, Dörner coaxes an extraordinary range of sounds out of his trumpet, from breathy resonances verging on white noise through to low frequency sounds of tongue fluttering and metallic percussive noises. Davies matches him in kind (again, some of her high notes could be electronic) but, more importantly, she always manages a response that is timely and appropriate. The end result is two instruments meshing into a seamless whole; the parts can be heard but they are so sympathetically matched that the whole is greater than their sum. Cleverly, the track titles reflect this symbiosis, being written half in German, half in Welsh. Very fitting.

The best of the bunch? Close, but it is really too close to call. “                    
John Eyles, All About Jazz

“A.D. are the initials of Angharad Davies (violin) and Axel Dörner (trumpet), a duo who you think you have probably heard already, but haven't. The London-Berlin axis has always been a rich one in improvised music, and has given rise to many subtle and fitting collaborations, and this one might have taken place five years ago. In fact this meeting was recorded in December 2008 and the resulting music is absolutely exemplary of the overlapping aesthetics of the two musicians.
The brilliance and luxuriousness of the instruments are deliberately set aside in favour of a more internal exploration, keeping a cool head and clear ideas. Proving once more his immensely impressive technique, Dörner concentrates on tiny areas of breath, whistling, saliva, sighs and whispers with a rigour that never lets up. As for Davies, she too exploits one by one the reduced surfaces of her instrument, brushing the strings to produce tonalities that border on ultrasound, stubbornly working with textures which, though fragile, never drag at any moment. The collaboration works in such a way that when one musician is anchored in one area, working to produce a theme, the other often imitates them or, alternately, sets up a counter-movement. I particularly enjoy « Stück Dau », which huddles in silence at the beginning and then unfolds wonderfully, tracing from the middle of nowhere an enticing pathway that leads ultimately into some kind of festival where it's as if the vibrations of atoms in orbit are made audible. Paradoxically quite conventional (from the point of view of the 'codes' of the genre), this performance, virtuosic in its sobriety, shines out above all through its finesse and clarity.”                                                  Jean-Claude Gevrey, scala tympani