Ganesh Anandan and Hans Reichel are instrument inventors as well as musicians, and this CD consists largely of duets between the two, recorded during a meeting in Wuppertal, Germany. Anandan, born in Bangalore, Southern India, and long resident in Montreal, performs on two different instruments. One, the shruti stick, is a twelve-string zither with prepared strings, that is plucked, bowed, or struck, and frequently played with a slide for glissando effects. Anandan’s other instrument is a metallophone that can be tuned in various ways. Together, the two instruments provide Anandan with a vast array of sounds stretching from elusive whispers of strings and metal to authentic invocations of India’s Carnatic violin music and the gamelan orchestras of Bali. Reichel, a native of Wuppertal, plays daxophone, which he invented. A wooden blade fitted to a wooden box, mounted on a tripod and then bowed, it somehow produces an exotic sound palette that ranges from musical saw and quacking duck through flute and violin timbres to some speech-like (and eerie) evocations of the human voice. Together, these improvisers construct highly original sound worlds that suggest traditional Asian music and musique concrète, free improvisation and nature recordings.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.