Bill MacKay & Katinka Kleijn – STIR (2019)  


Review:
Guitarist Bill MacKay and cellist Katinka Kleijn are a pair of respected and accomplished musicians with a gift for improvisation, and they make an impressive team on their first collaborative project, 2019's STIR. There's a confident give-and-take between the two artists and depending on their mood, they can weave languid patterns around one another, with the clear tone of MacKay's guitar dancing gracefully with the deeper, richer voice of Kleijn's cello, or engage in a brisk thrust and parry as he turns up the distortion and she scrapes her bow for all she's worth. As in most experimental improvisation pieces, STIR leans toward dissonance more often than clear melodic lines, but where some artists rely on skronk in this sort of context, MacKay and Kleijn appear to have little interest in noise for noise's sake. The brittle tone of some passages is balanced by a surprisingly gentle spirit, especially on "The Hermetic Circle," where Kleijn's fluid technique and sustained notes give MacKay a comfortable foundation as well as a partner in creative conversation. And even though these pieces value emotion and inspiration over technique, STIR makes it clear MacKay and Kleijn have a remarkable command of their instruments, capable of tightly focused and challenging work as well as less-structured flights of fancy. MacKay and Kleijn have performed and recorded with a large number of musicians in their careers, but STIR reveals they push one another to especially imaginative and expressive work, and this collaboration hardly appears to have made use of all their inspiration just yet. — by Mark Deming / allmusic.com


   


Track List:
01 - Prelude ⁄ Two Natures
02 - The Rare Foothold
03 - Hermine
04 - The Hermetic Circle
05 - No One Here Is a Stranger
06 - Door to the Magic Theatre
07 - A Series of Doors
08 - Path to the Peak


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, classical, experimental
Country: Chicago, Illinois, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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