Iancu Dumitrescu/Ana-Maria Avram - Etoiles Brisees (1998)

An hour-long trip into the hellscape of Romanian spectralism's two greatest dark mages, featuring only four tracks - and only three pieces, as Iancu Dumitrescu on this release only contributed the title track, done two ways.  But there's still enough unhinged genius packed in here to get immersed in for the foreseeable future.  Basically the average Edition Modern CD then.

Etoiles Brisees is first presented as an entirely computer-music based sound world, by turns eerily subdued and subaquatic, then blasting full-on digital noise into your synapses.  Straight afterwards, the piece repeats in an orchestrated version, but still with some noticeable electronic elements.  Ana-Maria Avram's two contributions here are both full-bodied string orchestra torture of the most exquisite kind, with the ghostly drones, moans and creaks of Seconde Axe particularly recommended.

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Previously posted on SGTG:
ED.MN.1001 - Medium/Cogito
ED.MN.1002 - Au Dela De Movemur
ED.MN.1003 - Pierres Sacreés
ED.MN.1004 - Musique de Paroles
ED.MN.1005 - Galaxy
ED.MM.1006 - A Priori
ED.MN.1008 - Five Pieces
ED.MN.1009 - Ouranos II 
ED.MN.1010 - Meteors & Pulsars 
ED.MN.1011 - Musique Action '98
ED.MN.1014 - Orbit of Eternal Grace
ED.MN.1018 - Remote Pulsar
ED.MN.1019 - In Tokyo

Iancu Dumitrescu / Ana-Maria Avram - In Tokyo (2003)

Let's have another Avram/Dumitrescu, shall we?  This one, as the title suggests, is centred around two live recordings from an October 2002 concert in Hamarikyu Asahi Hall in Tokyo, the first of which is Iancu's Abysses Latents.  Dark percussive clouds, mostly ominous gongs a la early NWW combine with rock-boring sax and a wordless, free vocal from Japanese avant-garde singer Keiko Hatanaka.  Yoko Ono is a lazy comparison to make, but hey, I'm on a holiday week and engaging my brain as little as possible.

On either side of this piece, Dumitrescu offers some of his trademark "computer-assisted" studio work, in the opener Implosive Eternity and the multi-part Bolids & Contemplations.  Sounding a bit like 90s Whitehouse played underwater in the latter piece and a bit like a less-clinical Autechre on the former, this stuff is the most engaging on the disc for me.

Avram contributes the most substantive work, certainly in numbers of players, with La Légende D'icaire for the full Hyperion Ensemble.  Tim Hodgkinson takes the lead with a nice honking, skronking bass clarinet solo, up against various string and percussion clatter - some of it electronically treated, increasingly so as the track goes on.  And how better to close out this fascinating release than with 11 minutes of solo saxophone?  Dedicated to its player, Turkey-based musicologist Robert Reigle, Penumbra is another great rumble 'n' screech through registers of its instrument that only composers with this strength of vision can go to.

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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.

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