Dumitrescu / Avram / Cutler / Hodgkinson - Musique Action 98 (1999)

Still making my way gradually through the Avram/Dumitrescu Edition Modern catalogue - up to No. 19 now, with some gaps of unavailability.  Here's an interesting one in that two of their key musical collaborators are also featured as composers.  The fact that almost everyone involved plays on each others works gives a nice album-length homogeneity and listenability to this release.

Rock In Opposition stalwart Chris Cutler contributes Life On Earth for ensemble with the focus on strings, alongside his own percussion featuring sparingly, and English avant-garde reedsman Tim Hodgkinson (who had been in RiO agitators Henry Cow with Cutler) gives us Black Death And Errors In Construction.  The shortest piece of the four, it packs in plenty of thunder and some great piano work from Avram before a midway solo for Hodgkinson's bass clarinet.

Avram's piece Nouvelle Axe is characteristically scratchy-spectral, fusing her string-torturing talents into a striking ensemble work, and Dumitrescu's New Meteors And Pulsars is arguably the highlight, a stunning account of (according to his endearingly pretentious sleevenote) of witnessing a meteor.  Assisted by Cutler on percussion, the underwater-sounding sonic manipulation characteristic to much late-90s Dumitrescu is very much in evidence.

link

Previously posted at SGTG:
ED.MN.1001
ED.MN.1002
ED.MN.1003