With how unassuming their setup is (one alto saxophone, one sampler), no one could be faulted for expecting Breathing Heavy’s music to be similarly reserved. But that’s just their cover, a strategic misdirect to throw off rivals in the running for the Most Likely to Give Your Grandmother a Heart Attack superlative. I’m spearheading a retrospective reevaluation of the word “skronk”… did it really mean anything until this shit came around? Perhaps even more incessant and uncompromising than anything the two subversive improvisers have done previously—whether Ciaran Mackle’s work as Ola Nathair (solo) and NNM favorite Ashcircle (with Tom Macarte) or Sam Andreae’s raucous collaborations with David Birchall and others (check out the Steep Gloss tape with Yan Jun)—not bad streamlines and then supercharges the approach they debuted with Heavy Breathing on Infant Tree last year. While the duo’s looping exchanges of shiver and squawk are definitely not reserved, they are restrained in a noticeable way. The tight interplay never takes off into full-fledged jamming, instead sticking to a precise frequency of agitation, like an overloaded circuit that slowly but steadily burns itself out. Mackle’s pre-loaded woodwind bites and Andreae’s controlled live spasms always seem to anticipate each other, feeding into the demented circularity of it all. The title cut has to be my favorite of the four; who among us hasn’t been in an aviary and thought, yeah but what if this sounded way more fucked up?
Noise Not Music 