John Butcher/ Mike Hansen/ Tomasz Krakowiak
EQUATION
 
 
 
 

John Butcher, soprano and tenor saxophones
Mike Hansen, record players Mike Hansen's Myspace
Tomasz Krakowiak, percussion
 

Produced and mixed by Mike Hansen.
Recorded by Paul Hodge, live to 2 track, at the Music Gallery, St. George the Martyr Church, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 2002.
 
 

What the Critics are Saying:
 

A key to the success of this recording is the well-balanced "equation" of these three specific musicians.  Hansen is a Toronto-based turntablist who tends more to Christian Marclay than Kid Koala.  He explains, "I started manipulating records back in high school during my school radio program.  My sound comes from two old record players and a couple of guitar pedals."  Krakowiak self-deprecatingly refers to his set-up as "Nothing else but a drum with a microphone attached to it, going further to an old digital delay/ echo/ reverb effect box."  Butcher, one of Britain's most renowned improvisors of the last decade, uses his sax as a wind, pad and spit amplifier rather than a single-toned instrument.  Together, it's hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off.  Equation is editied into two suites.  The results sound like a greatest hits (greatest bits?) compilation, but each suite is coherent.

Working with a pair of like-minded partners on "Equation", Butcher adds to his palette a few jazzy characteristics - notes, phrases, fractured rhythms - that jostle or blend with the sonic debris offered by Mike Hansen on turntables and subtle percussionist Tomasz Krakowiak.  Woven into two multi-movement suites ("Noise Temperature Suite" and the slightly more aggressive "Standing Wave Suite"), their trio music has a looser if disjointed flow, featuring jagged edges, spontaneity, and surprise, as well as a broader variety of types of sound, especially the briefly recognizable, distorted, quick-cut LP quotes from Hansen's turntables - operatic voices, other instruments (was that a sped-up sample of "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida"?), and vinyl surface noise.  All of which serve to, in Cage's words, "thicken the plot."

A fine sustained exemplar of this fragile improvisational form. Because of the skill, sensitivity and concentration of the players, this works.