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.