Bone Bells
Sylvie Courvoisier; Mary Halvorson
Pyroclastic Records PR 40 (sylviecourvoisier.bandcamp.com/album/bone-bells)
The title track begins with a slow, steady pulse trading hands. This pulse has a destination, and will gradually reveal itself as cyclical, but at the start, it is just the slightest notion of a march. Guitar first, and then as if flipping a switch, the piano seamlessly picks up the very next beat. One instrument creates space, one scribbles in the margins, and then this process repeats until that pulse begins to grow heavier, slower, more laboured. Finally, after almost stalling entirely, the original tempo and dynamic return, velocitizing the listener into feeling that initial interval of time as something lighter.
The improvised passages between Sylvie Courvoisier and Mary Halvorson begin to defy timeflow even more; melodic phrases finding subversive entry and exit points, glitches that embed themselves in the logic of everything we’re hearing. When we come to a standstill again, Courvoisier seems to always play the same piano chord that suddenly anticipates the next pulse, with Halvorson picking two notes at a time to almost illusively hold up any form of stability that is left. The piece ends with the pattern being abruptly cut short in a manner that implies perpetual continuity. What ensues is a series of increasingly intricate ideas trading hands, back and forth, down to the way the tracklist cycles back and forth between the two composers’ offerings. Always there is fullness in the spaces in between.
