Lucio Capece & Lee Patterson
empty matter

Lucio Capece   soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, preparations, sruti box
Lee Patterson  cd players, pick-ups, ebowed springrods, springplate, hazelnuts

1.   Impeler            5:50
2.   Suspender       3:35
3.   Fervesce          6:35
4.   Ventilar            7:48
5.   Coriolis            5:45
6.   Insuflar            7:48
7.   Sostener          5:12
8.   Burning           9:56

 Recorded in London, June 2009

     

Reviews

“My breath is long-that's the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath.
~ Allen Ginsberg

first, last, outer, inner, only that breath
breathing human being.
~ Rumi

Lucio Capece has contributed his reed instruments, shruti box and carefully developed concepts to quite a few releases in the past few years. Listening through a clutch of these, I decided to focus on three duos from the past two years. While these three projects pair Capece with disparate temperaments and instrumentation, I began to hear an aspect of continuity and cohesion across the pairings that points to Capece's understated role as a framer of the pieces- his breathy reeds and shruti box limning, shading and subtly nudging the direction the duos take, not unlike the way in which Keith Rowe's recondite but sturdy sounds-at-the-edges-of-the-canvas operate.

Drilling down deeper into the gradually emerging, unflickering presence and influence Capece attains with the gentlest of sounds, even when his foil is the amplified plangency of metal springs, motors and frying pans, as in his stunning collaboration with Lee Patterson, Empty Matter, I hear what the unitive element is for me.

It is his breath- when measured, applied and integrated as Capece does in these meetings, there is nothing less intrusive or obvious, nor more tensile and powerful, than the mindfully measured breath. Capece's breath lengths, as well as the textures of tongue and lips, find their analogy in the privileging of the breath as the basic metric of the poetry of Ginsberg and his contemporaries, as Rowe's analogous, likewise initially imperceptible role as a canvas for his collaborators has its metaphor in abstract painting.

No start, no ending, no development, Capece has said of his musical aspirations, at least not in that [nor in any] order. Indeed, some of Capece's work, particularly the duos with Radu Malfatti and long-time collaborator Sergio Merce, can easily be imagined as unspooling endlessly in the aether, riding the breath, without beginning or end.

This adamantine quality of Capece's breath-work is rigorously tested and teased in his fantastic duo with Lee Patterson on Empty Matter. Patterson's pallette includes an amplified spring-board redolent of Will Guthrie's junk instrumentation, and a frying pan of chattering chestnuts [the sonic cousin to his marvelous-and I'm not being ironic- recording of fried eggs on his 2009 Cathnor release, Egg Fry #2]. In other words, Patterson tosses ingredients into the mix other than the steady-state pitches endemic [and frequently anaemic] in drone works. This makes for a more visceral, at times raucous affair; again, Capece holds his mat with superbly focused long tones and nuanced variations in pitch. Equanimity is not an absence of imagination nor flexibility, and I hope I am not conveying the idea that Capece is somehow rigid or unresponsive in adhering to the anchoring breath. On the contrary, he can move between his partners' clamour and absurdist sound sources with a flexibility that serves each project admirably.

Capece floats, shimmers and at times seems to disappear among these three duo works. Sometimes a musician in this area of music will challenge themselves with an extreme reduction of means for sound production, or reimagine the archetypal instrument [whatever you call that object guitarist Keith Rowe approaches with increasingly bracing results]; Capece has been working with that most elemental, immediate and available sound source, the breath. In some respects, he is making some of the most, as Rumi would have it, human-sounding music around. I cannot recommend him highly enough.”
Jesse Goin, Crow with no Mouth

“It’s not surprising that Lucio Capece (saxophone, clarinet, preparations, shruti-box) and Lee Patterson (cd players, amplified objects) should combine forces on a disc on the Another Timbre label.  The two experimentalists produce a dark, stormy music whose aesthetic imperatives match perfectly those of the lively young English label. Here their experiments create neither technical complexity nor a reassuring stable universe.  Lucio Capece provides the essential basis of the soundworld with his repetitive, granular breaths or with the humming drone he creates with his Indian shruti-box.  Sometimes it’s difficult to know the source of the sounds with any certainty.  The booklet that accompanies the disc tells you that Lee Patterson uses hazel nuts as a sound source, but how do you identify these sounds?  These uncertainties reinforce the aura of mystery, of an electronic matter that is full of fissures.  The unorthodox use of traditional instruments and diverse objects combine and create an irruption of a musical otherness, similar in certain respects to the noises you might hear in your kitchen or living room, but produced by spellbinding improvisers with a telling economy of gesture and discourse.”
Jean Dezart, Le Son du Grisli

“Capece plays soprano sax, bass clarinet, preparations and sruti box (featured in a delightful drone piece called “Sostener”, one of my favourites), while Patterson is active on CD players, pickups, eBowed springrods, springplate and hazelnuts. The duo is endowed with a considerable percentage of mutual receptiveness, a factor that often transforms even the most ordinary occurrences into dazzling sounds. The harmonic substance of a single pitch can become, pertinently magnified, an ascetic choral hymn. The coincidence of frying pan activity, reiterated notes and unpromisingly vague rattling heard in “Fervesce” is outright splendid, among the disc’s top episodes, immediately followed by the affecting thickness of “Ventilar”, an improvisation that exploits the junction of echoing metals and squealing insinuations (the latter made me look out of the window twice to see if cats were doing damage somewhere in the garden). Underscoring the activities, the steady throbbing of a low-frequency underworld keeps us prepared for a display of power that instead remains merely hinted, unexpressed. Persistently acute intrusive emissions by Capece attempt to limit a latent tendency to needless lavishness (with all that menacing jangling, you never know), confining the interaction in face-to-face dialogues between regal roar and gritty roughness. In “Coriolis”, old-fashioned, but still efficient percussive patterns are supplemented by the intrinsic features of their original source, giving life to dissentient trance tarnished by rust, symbolizing a routine that is both physical and rational yet, somehow, lets the victims get a glimpse of non-illusory methods for escaping.”                                     
Massimo Ricci, Temporary Fault