Matt Bauder Object 3 CD

Personnel: Matt Bauder (tenor saxophone); Jason Ajemian (bass).
Personnel: Matt Bauder (tenor saxophone); Jason Ajemian (upright bass).
Recording information: Bloomington-Normal.
Bassist Ajemian and tenor saxophonist Bauder set up their mikes one night on the back porch in Chicago and recorded themselves playing a half hour's worth of quiet sustained tones. Local traffic noise and the buzz of various nearby insects were also captured on the tape, imparting a refreshingly natural feel, far from the pristine claustrophobia of a studio session. The first half of the proceedings was recorded simultaneously on two mini-discs by some friends in attendance, who inserted index markers here and there and subsequently played the resulting tracks on random shuffle. "Normal" starts out then as a duo and ends as a quartet. While the players presumably chose their pitches as they went along rather than following any predetermined score or plan of action, and the shuffle playback of the mini-discs adds something of an element of surprise (at least in the pitch domain), it's perhaps open to question whether Object 3 should be classified as improvised music as such; sonically, and to a lesser extent procedurally, it has more in common with certain pieces of late Cage. ~ Dan Warburton