Anette Krebs & Rhodri Davies
kravis rhonn project

Annette Krebs - guitar, mixing board, tapes
Rhodri Davies - electric harp & electronics

1. traguar            21:25
2. jailom              12:03
3. ssronck           12:08

Recorded in Berlin, April 2008
Edited, mixed & mastered by Annette Krebs

Reviews

“Very strong, extremely well integrated set,  Krebs and Davies meshing perfectly; had I been told this was a (complex) solo set, I'd have accepted that.  There's a wonderful gliding aspect to much of the music here, maybe set into motion largely by Davies, a kind of slow, up and down swoop, that's quite entrancing, all the more so when adorned with pebbles of taped sounds, gritty static, etc.  Great balance of soft dronage, occasional quasi-rhythms, super-sensitive inclusion of quiet voices--next to impossible to describe to any degree of satisfaction, but that's usually the case with something as beautifully positioned as this.  Mandatory.”         
Brian Olewnick, Just Outside

“I’ve been listening to the recent release by Rhodri Davies and Annette Krebs on the Another Timbre label quite bit over the past week or so, but while I know I really like it a great deal I haven’t really been able to find the right words to be able to say what it is I enjoy about it. I’m still not sure now I have the right words to hand, but I’ll have a go.

Annette Krebs has been making wonderfully surprisingly, unusual and somewhat oblique music for a few years now, but if the truth be told so has Rhodri Davies in the right company. Together here they both seem to step up a gear, firing off of each other to produce music that repeatedly does the unexpected but at the same time still just sounds right, as if each sound is placed just where it belongs, even if they don’t always seem to follow naturally from the sounds before. If that reads a little vague I can only apologise, its hard to think of other ways of describing Kravis Rhonn Project, which is the (pretty bad) title for this album.

Rhodri uses his tabletop electric harp for this recording, something he is doing increasingly often as a bad back and spiralling travel costs make lugging a full scale harp around a currently more difficult thing to do. Over the past couple of years he has begun to really find his voice with this laid-flat version of his chosen instrument however, and on this new album his range of sounds; buzzing, scraping, droning, chiming and even the occasional all out roaring are put to use brilliantly. While he may allow a sound to flutter or hum in the background for a while, others will build for a second or two before being cut dead. The range in sounds and textures allows Krebs the space and opportunity to place bits of sampled voices, radio grabs and the odd guitar chime into the gaps. Some of the voices used here come from recordings of dadaist sound poets Annette found online last year. A few of which found their way into her trio performance I caught with David Lacey and Paul Vogel last year, so although that was six months ago now they sound strangely familiar to me now.

At one point in the opening track Traguar (the titles come from the imaginary words spoken by the aforementioned voices) a blizzrd of sound from both musicians falls off the edge of the recording and the silence left behind is suddenly filled with a grainy blast of a rap record, some other unidentifiably cheesy music and then an oddly disembodied voice. This few moments of the music seems to sum up Kravis Rhonn Project for me, hints at the kind of electroacoustic improvisation we might have expected from this duo a few years back cut short by these odd breaks in the musical narrative. Near the end of the third track a thick, claustrophobic hum rises out of the music and builds in intensity until suddenly snapping dead, leaving a few seconds of distant sounds and then a half second burst of unidentifiable voice. This is how the album goes. It is exciting to listen to, full of these sudden twists and precarious cliffhangers but also a work of great focus and concentration as the two musicians wrap their contributions around each other so well that you lose track of who might be doing what.

I wrote a week or two back about a trio disc involving Davies alongside Robin Hayward and Taku Unami and said that the music on that release seemed to fit within a recent group of CDs and performances that feature new approaches to the sonic communication between musicians, utilising juxtaposed seemingly unrelated sounds rather than gentle blends of similar sounding events. Kravis Rhonn Project fits that aesthetic to some degree, with the radio grabs, voices and sudden struck sounds playing counterpoint to the more musical abstract elements, but it should also be said that when sounds from both musicians are allowed to coalesce here in a more traditional manner they are also very beautiful indeed. That it isn’t easy to place this CD into one firm box or the other is only to its own credit.

The three pieces on this album total up to some forty-five minutes in length, and I have listened through to it maybe as many as eight or nine times now but really it seems so much shorter, such is the way it really grabs the attention. Recorded only a year ago it offers a rare contemporary view of where two continually evolving musicians are currently at, something that, in Rhodri’s case in particular has not often happened in the past. It is also yet another fine fine release on the Another Timbre label, which can do little wrong in my eyes recently. Album of the year so far.“                                                                              Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

“Annette Krebs & Rhodri Davies – Kravis Rhonn Project  (Another Timbre)
Max Eastley & Rhodri Davies – Dark Architecture (Another Timbre)

While these two albums were realised under very different circumstances, they’re united on sonic and philosophical levels.  The attunement that electric harpist Rhodri Davies and his confederates achieve is profound.  Tabletop guitarist Annette Krebs assembled Kravis Rhonn from recordings that she and Davies made in her apartment.  Strings scrape and pluck, outboard electronics sputter and abruptly drop out, both players working with small gestures so similar they could be playing a single instrument.  It’s easier to differentiate Davies’s e-bow hums and cirrus pitches from the ghostly groans and lonesome whistles of Eastley’s arc, a self-constructed, flexible wood and wire monochord, on the live recording Dark Architecture, but their confluence is so perfect it’s pointless to do so.  Particularly since the larger point of both records seems to be the productive coexistence of each duo’s playing with potentially disruptive elements.

Dark Architecture enjoys the involvement of both planned and unplanned randomisers.  The original plan was for the two men to play along with eastley’s sound generating sculptures, whose occasional ringing and clatter contribute a laconic commentary, sparse yet pertinent.  Less polite are the fireworks from a neighbouring park that start up about 11 minutes in, so loud you couldn’t have blamed the duo for stepping out until the display was over and then trying again.  Instead, the fireworks become part of the music, less predictable and more insistent than Eastley’s sculptures, yet all framed by singing sine tones and bowed sighs.

The disruption on Kravis Rhonn is presumably more planned.  Krebs is credited with tapes, which consist mostly of music and voices snatched off the internet.  German newsreaders, archived sound poets and traces of rap and traffic noise rise up through Krebs and Davies’s shimmering surfaces, pockmarking them like potholes on city streets, occasionally cutting the playing short.  The duo seem to be hanging back, trying to figure out how to fit into this rough surface rather than roll over it.  It’s a sublime ride. “                                         Bill Meyer, The Wire