Wires And Wooden Boxes

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'Wires and Wooden Boxes' is an exercise in free improvisation within self-imposed boundaries. Before each track, Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth came up with a direction that they'd take while performing, forcing them to focus on navigating the music together rather than shooting down the rapids of experimentation with only carte blanche as a compass.

The opening track is the most arresting. 'NYC Journal excerpt (2000) piano/guitar' is based on music interpreted from ink drawings and scraps of words, somehow guiding the duo as they create the track with piano and static generated from the input jack and live power-cord plug of an electric guitar. The journey sounds as if it's grounded in an uneasy companionship between Morton Feldman and Aube. Tentative and restrained explorations on the piano produce a climate of foreboding, while the stabs of electricity cut through this delicacy like a machete.

Other tracks forego this dichotomy and opt for a more direct delivery. 'Straight To It' moves like a river that flows to a waterfall. Quick, short runs on the piano grow stronger in volume and frequency. An electric guitar joins in, duplicating the turbulence until the two tumble over each other in a vehement rush. 'Pulled Wires... "Acoustic/Electric #13"' doesn't even bother with a build-up. Acoustic and electric guitars are pulled and plucked viciously, the strings glistening with the abuse.

As mentioned in the liner notes to 'Wires and Wooden Boxes', in improv music "... the 'free' approach can often yield vocabularies and styles which become rigid and repetitive over time". Diaz-Infante and Forsyth circumvent this stagnation by ensuring that their compositions, and the way that they build them, are challenging and fresh from the beginning