DYW with Kola Dykhne and Solo Operator – Negative Space

Description

DYW (pronounce it like what Jacques Cousteau was famous for doing) is a dialed-in trio of improvisers, given to nurturing, growing and moving big blocks of sound. Displaced from Moscow by geopolitical storms of the early 2020s, Danya, Yasha and Vova now reside in several different countries, and have brought with them this astonishing document of togetherness, produced in the moments before the shit hit the fan.

DYW‘s new album Negative Space, their second overall and first for FPE, is a collaboration with sympathetic reedists Solo Operator and Kola Dykhne, recorded in an airy, bright house in the country, a day of friendship and concentrated work. It’s a reverb-rich space, conducive to the group’s relationship with sounds; echoes soften, blend and round the contours. Filaments of clarinet swim through currents of baritone and malleted toms; cetacean form lumbers nimbly in deep waters. “Chariot”‘s ostinato sways unsteadily through a difficult meter, dilating and collapsing as the soloists jump around. The set is a revelation of the ecstasy of a self-generated and self-sustained macro-environment; pure playing, musical noise.

File this one somewhere between the sax-fueled apocalypse parties of The Comet Is Coming and the noise sacrament of Peter Brötzmann‘s “Machine Gun”; but slow it down to geologic time and infuse with an unshakeable, unmistakeable 2024-style existential dread.

Negative Space will be available in digital format from FPE Records March 22, 2024.