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.