Simon Angell (Thus Owls) on guitar and Tommy Crane on percussion have never before offered audiences a recorded duo project on record, despite many years of collaboration on numerous musical adventures on the rich Montreal scene. The eponymously-named Angell & Crane offers us a glimpse of the kind of spontaneous creative explosion that can spring from the meeting of two aces in contemporary improvisation, with a rock base and learned/intuitive instrumentation.
The two artists sat down in a studio for six days, improvised, and let all the inspiration of the moment explode in order to make an album. Where the approach diverges substantially from the usual habits of the genre is that the subsequent production became a full participant in the final result. Not just sonically, but musically and dialectically. Improv purists will often overlook the post-capture stage. What’s important for them is that the final result is as faithful as possible to the creative experience of the improvisational moment.
Here, a different attitude has been adopted. The 40 hours or so of recorded music were worked on as raw material serving as a basis for the composition of a final corpus of around forty minutes.
The result is a great success, a kind of spontaneity drawn with care. The play of textures is important and exciting. The patterns, reflections and other three-dimensional movements come and go like the eddies of an undulating musical flow, from left to right and above all from front to back and vice versa. But all the excellent spatialisation would be mere artifice if Angell and Crane’s instinctive impulses weren’t firmly anchored in a narrative that is admittedly impressionistic/expressionist, but solidly coherent.
Several aspects of Indie/experimental music from the Montreal Sound scene are brought together in a largely dreamlike and ambient framework. Drone, no wave punk, a little shoegaze, contemporary abstraction. The two artists question and respond to each other in a discourse that is sometimes ghostly, sometimes more embodied, somewhere between acoustic and electric. There are occasional surprising and exciting appearances from singer Sarah Rossy and saxophonist Charlotte Greve. The whole thing is very beautiful, often dreamy. Angell & Crane is a little gem of experimental indie improvisational music.
