Zero Centigrade - Unknown Distances [AudioTong]

Zero Centigrade :
Tonino Taiuti - acoustic guitar & composition
Vincenzo De Luce - trumpet

AudioTong 2011

While it's great to get to have yet another album by one of my favourites (like Vandermark or Trzaska or Brotzmann just to name some examples) some of the most inspiring listening experiences for me lately came in the form of total surprise, music delivered by artists whom I know nothing about and as I've been introduced to them it's the goal of this blog to introduce them to you.

AudioTong is a small independent label in Poland releasing experimental music that usually resides outside the modern jazz scene and this cd is an example of that. Tonino Taiuti and Vincenzo De Luce create together a sonorus mixture that goes beyond (or below? or just beside?) traditional notions of music, melodies, notes and well outside the classical ways of playing their given instruments. 15 short pieces bring forward sounds that would be difficult to associate with acoustic guitar or trumpet, metallic scrapes, plucking,  breathing whispers, gurgling noises. While occasionaly an almost-melody appears in a liyrical way ("Dry River"), the pieces focus mostly on strange and distorted sounds, revealing slowly their inner structure, the hidden logic of the ugly details and chaos. With its eternally slow tempos this is music of a zero-gravity atmosphere. What it lacks in dynamic it makes up in sense of space and time. It's dark and mysterious and best served in the evening.

The cd presents also one of the most musically fitting covers I've seen - dark and silent.

Recommended to those looking for eerie and transcendental.

Before you decide to get a copy you can listen to some tracks on the duo's myspace: http://www.myspace.com/zerocentigrade