Plume by John Butcher & Tony Buck in trios with Burkhard Stangl & Magda Mayas

CD originally released on UNSOUNDS

Fiamme BUCK | BUTCHER | STANGL (2007)
Vellum BUCK | BUTCHER | MAYAS (2011)

TONY BUCK: drums and percussion
JOHN BUTCHER: saxophones
MAGDA MAYAS: piano
BURKHARD STANGL: guitar

"To scale the sound and build silence into the music is of course included, but John Butcher moves in a much wider field. Great dynamics are rather a hallmark, as well as the ability to play polyphonic. There is an enormous wealth in his tone. With the trio format, new voltage fields follow, even if the dense longitudinal sounds remain. In a little more than half an hour, Vellum  has time to visit many different areas. With a background in more rock-based music (Australian The Necks), I think I hear a slightly different drumming with Tony Buck than with other impro drum drums, a different attack, a different sound. With preparations, Magda Mayas gets an almost broken sound in the grand piano, she works a lot with repeated sound sequences and is very rhythmic. Together they create a very dynamic music, they build up high pressures but also allow themselves to dig into details. An incomparable music.

The trio with the Austrian Burkhard Stangl is different. Stangl's guitar playing undergoes a form of metamorphosis from picked sounds á la Derek Bailey to adding open chords. The latter is much more exciting. There are given lines in this improvisation as well, but they are not quite as clear. There are more harvests in the small sounds, bells and different percussion, individual tones guitar tones, smacking on saxophone. It's a bit into the improvisation that really exciting things start to happen: rising saxophone sounds, scattered guitar chords and frantic drumming. That Stangl so clearly stands outside the tradition is beneficial."
SOUND OF MUSIC - Magnus Nygren

Improviser, Composer, Saxophonist.
Born in Brighton.
Lives in London.

johnbutcher.org.uk