Bowing Cafe Mars CD

Village Voice Review by Kyle Gann - "Martha Mooke and Randy Hudson, who call their duo Bowing, aimed at a smoother blend. Mooke, who played solo for the first half, used to play a blue electric viola and now plays a red one, but the striking contrast with her white hair remains the same. By looping and pitch-bending herself via foot pedals she creates an entire string quartet without assistance. This means that all of her music turns on the device of the ostinato, the repeating loop, though when she wants to, she can so obscure that device that we don't notice it. Joining her on electric guitar, Hudson relied more on delay units, setting up textures ofquickly repeating figures that blended with Mooke's ostinatos. Bowing's music, and Mooke's soloing as well, have plenty of what I call negative virtues: Nothing ever goes on too long, no effect is too obvious, every move is tasteful. Positive virtues-inspired images, elegant structures-are present, but less uniformly. If these works were an accurate indication, Mooke's music has gotten darker and thicker than it used to be, and has given up the Terry Riley-ish spaciness it once had. After the Fall was dense and mournful, like Harold Budd, and in Virtual Corridors she played over dissonantly intertwined ostinatos. In older works she made the viola sound like electric guitar and train whistles, while Hudson's cascading echoes reminded me of Robert Fripp's "Frippertronics" of the late '70s (which Fripp ripped off from Riley somewhat). If the sonic images were precise, the forms were agreeably loose, making each piece feel like a sonic landscape: Sometimes desert imperceptibly morphed into forest; other times, at the push of a foot pedal, we'd turn a corner and suddenly encounter a completely different vista. And despite the jazz licks and odd meters, Mooke never had to worry about straying too far from romanticism: By nature the viola carries its romanticism along with it."