John Butcher & Phil Durrant, Requests & Antisongs (CD)

While 2000 was the heyday of lower-case improvisation (or EAI, or whatever other unfortunate names people came up with at the time), Requests & Antisongs has aged nicely. The foundation for this one is really Butcher's creative sax playing—textural and extended in distinctive and tasteful ways. Durrant only contributes processing here, no violin, and it seems to stretch Butcher's technique further and more abstract, more often than it introduces a distinctive voice of its own. While it dates a time when electro-acoustic improvisation was focused on sounding as small and pointillistic as possible, Requests & Antisongs uses a broader palette. It's mastered at an unnecessarily quiet volume, and I really can't make sense of the cover art, but these facts may not necessarily be bad things.

Run On, On/Off (12" EP)

I like pretty much everything that Rick Brown & Sue Garner make, and On/Off still sounds as fresh and inspiring as in 1995 when it was released. For a new band's first release, Run On definitely did not try to constrain the scope of their vision or make it easy for a newcomer to their work. There's a bit of everything here, from a really catchy pop song ("Into the Attic") to a couple of textural workouts, to less melodic tracks with foreground vocals. It's all a bit raw-sounding without resembling the nominal lo-fi of its era, and all of the different types of tracks work. Adding as strong a personality as Alan Licht did not lead to a diminished band chemistry—everything really holds together. The blurry front cover image of a levitating body, which seems to have been appropriated, fits the music perfectly, but the font and colors don't mesh quite as well for me.

Stevie Wonder, Innervisions (side A)

While it's hard to add much new insight about 1973's Innervisions, it's still amazing to listen and think about Stevie Wonder playing nearly everything. While the album is not entirely consistent, the classics continue to justify its reputation as a classic. The incongruous spoken breakdowns would seem dated had Outkast not borrowed the concept for a recent hit. And it's definitely strange, by modern standards, to hear a funk-y album with so little low-end. The Afro-centric art is distinctive, especially on the inside of the gatefold.

Lionel Marchetti & Seijiro Murayama, Hatali Ataslei (l'échange des yeux) (CD)

Lionel Marchetti has of course been active in making very abstract music for years, especially his collaborations with Jérôme Noettinger. I'm not familiar with Seijiro Murayama, though the Internet tells me that he's a percussionist. The stronger personality here seems to be Marchetti, as it took effort to even find live percussion in a more recognizably concrète soundscape. Eventually some of the scrapes and bangs seem to have a live origin, but the two musicians have definitely integrated seamlessly. Hatali Atsalei is not a friendly listen, but it's a beautiful and subtly evolving one—it's surprisingly musical in its flow despite the sounds themselves lacking any such conventional referents. I like the inner scribbles more than the carefully designed front cover, but neither seems closely coupled with the music on the CD.