Music Reviews from the Staff of the Poison Pie Publishing House

 

April 17, 2022
Mnemosyne - Orsa
Label: Barefoot Records
Catalog #: BFREC069LP
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
Release Date: March 7, 2022
Media: 10" vinyl or digital download
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The range of landscapes of acoustic territory that can be visited by a duet of alto saxophone and electric guitar is vast. On this record, listeners accompany two travelers as they journey through diverse spaces. They do not travel by train, for in such a mode of transportation the view of the surrounding landscape changes gradually. Instead, this pair of musicians has opted to journey, it appears, by teleportation, as if they dwelt in a remote country house of variable location, in which each time that they opened the door they were presented with a different vista.

They endeavor to use the same two instruments to describe all of these views, with each track providing a vignette in the language of saxophone and guitar. Some pictures are described with the plaintive melody of Ms. Dybbroe's alto saxophone, to which the strumming of Mr. Lykke provides sympathetic accompaniment. Other images are captured with feedback, distortion and extraction from the saxophone of a variety of dissonant sounds. In each case, the listener is invited to reconstruct the vista based on the musical characterization.

In general, people travel for different reasons--for business, for relaxation, to visit old friends and, as is too often the case today, to find refuge. Regardless, exposure to new places educates the traveler by prompting them to see the world in another light. While in revisiting places long since left behind, the traveler remembers perspectives now abandoned. We hear in this album a breadth of perspectives from well-traveled voices who retain the excitement of experiencing and describing each new discovery.

As a parting note, Mnemosyne is the ancient Greek goddess of memory and the mother of the muses. Here we see her name invoked in the creation of this travelogue, intended to record the snippets of a journey deemed worthy of preservation.

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