Platanus
Scott Thomson; Allison Cameron
ambiances magnetiques AM 287 CD (scottthomson.bandcamp.com/album/platanus)
When it comes to improvised music, some of the most magical moments to me as a listener occur when I cannot pinpoint precisely which participant was responsible for a particular sound. These moments can be fleeting, and the illusion can be broken with relative ease, but they are transcendent; even hierarchy-disrupting. Suddenly, distinctions between voices and textures cease to matter as much, instruments shed their skin to merely become skeletal shapes, and the ensuing output becomes all that is truly real in the mind’s eye. I bring this up to say, Platanus has too many of these to count, and they accumulate even more on repeat listens.
The improvising duo of Cameron and Thomson is truly formidable, both as a sum and as a cohesive unit. Individually, their voices on their instrument(s) have been honed and expanded to the point of being able to convey a universe of textural information alone, and the collision of these cosmic expanses amplify this exponentially. Together, a word like “telepathy” does the tangible level of active listening and deep consideration for where each micro-gesture fits. At any given second, both musicians can be a percussionist, an operatic voice, a field of crickets, an intercepted radio signal or the scrape of sheet metal. Pairing electricity with brass in this way places digital and analog sound on the same continuum, with the utter dismantling of such a distinction being ultimately achieved.
