[alternative folk, classical, experimental] (2019) Bill MacKay and Katinka Kleijn - STIR [FLAC] [DarkAngie]

(2019) Bill MacKay and Katinka Kleijn - STIR

Review:
Guitarist Bill MacKay and cellist Katinka Kleijn are a pair of respected and accomplished musicians with a gift for improvisation, and they make an impressive team on their first collaborative project, 2019’s STIR. There’s a confident give and take between the two artists, and depending on their mood they can weave languid patterns around one another, with the clear tone of MacKay’s guitar dancing gracefully with the deeper, richer voice of Kleijn’s cello, while elsewhere they engage in a brisk thrust and parry, as he turns up the distortion and she scrapes her bow for all she’s worth. As in most experimental improvisation pieces, STIR leans to dissonance more often than clear melodic lines, but where some artists rely on skronk in this sort of context, MacKay and Kleijn appear to have little interest in noise for noise’s sake. The brittle tone of some passages are balanced by a surprisingly gentle spirit, especially on “The Hermetic Circle,” where Kleijn’s fluid technique and sustained notes give MacKay a comfortable foundation as well as a partner in creative conversation. And even though these pieces value emotion and inspiration over technique, STIR makes it clear MacKay and Kleijn have a remarkable command of their instruments, capable of tightly focused and challenging work as well as less structured flights of fancy. MacKay and Kleijn have performed and recorded with a large number of musicians in their careers, but STIR reveals they push one another to especially imaginative and expressive work, and this collaboration hardly appears to have made use of all their inspiration just yet.

Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, classical, experimental
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits