“ Of course! This is the edge of the world! This is the resistance!”
-Fred Frith, from the liner notes
With a lovely, poetic title and euphoric liner notes from guitarist Fred Frith, this album was irresistible. The phrase “fishes that have their own light” fills me with excitement thinking about the mysterious bioluminescent creatures of the deep sea.But it’s the word “discovering” that matters most to me. Improvised music for me is all about discovery, discovering new sounds, new sonic worlds, new ways of communicating. I wanted this music to not just be great, but to match the mood the title stirred in me. Does it succeed? Very much so.
I discovered Katharina Weber through her beautiful piano solo album In Márta’s Garden, based on compositions of György Kurtág. She weaves improvisations with the classical compositions of Kurtág to build something wonderfully new. She frequently lets individual notes linger and their decay becomes as important as the note itself.
Paula Sanchez is an improvising cellist, using various extended techniques including electronics and a prepared cello. Her solo album Sólo Un Pasaje demonstrates the many aspects of her playing. One can hear her classical training, but then the music will veer sharply into something unrecognizable, almost jolting. Beautiful cello notes mix with harsh scrapes and screeches. In her liner notes to Sólo Un Pasaje, she wrote something that applies nicely to both Sólo Un Pasaje and the present album: “I would like to think of sound as a passage, an endless transition. A subterranean murmur of opposite materials fragilely linked to each other, like the places I inhabit.” Beauty and harshness, fragilely linked together, make for a new sonic world to explore.
The album begins with rolling low notes from Weber’s piano matched by Sanchez’s cello which at first feels like it’s exploring this deep ocean universe that Weber is creating. As the music progresses, the cello sounds less and less like classical cello and more its own unique voice. Are we hearing those remarkable creatures of the title? At about the two-minute mark, there is a sharp uptick of intensity and even as the music becomes more and more intense, it is clear that these two musicians are communicating on a profound level, and that remains the case for the entirety of this wonderful album. There are quiet, peaceful places here as well. We hear Weber’s prepared piano at one point and Sanchez vocalizing at another. Every note, every sound is there for a reason, is there with a desire to say something new, something beautiful and maybe a bit eerie, much like the ocean depths of the title. This is improvised music at its very finest. This was one of the very best albums of 2025.
Just as this review began, I’ll end it with the words of the great Fred Frith from the liner notes:
“A play of surfaces, of formal proposals countermanded by a deep impulse to question, to challenge, to undermine. Every echo, every pulsating breath, every breaking away into distant reveries, all of its exquisite tension capturing the ear and the heart and holding them fast.”
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