Touching Extremes
CARL STONE, Nak Won (Sonore)
Many years have passed since I first listened to the (still wonderful)
"Mom's", a record that helped my already attentive ears
to open themselves to a new world of fabulous sounding colours.
After several more CDs and a few minutes of the title track beginning
here, I detect the same Carl Stone "aura", only masked
into a kind of minimalism that is just apparent. Stone's G3 Powerbook
is the anima mundi of three pieces: "Nak Won" is 24
minutes of the same very few notes pronounced by the machine just
like the same single word told by a million world citizens of
various races and languages: at the end, there's a giant cloud
made of singular timbres, a swarming sensation still hovering
around when everything's over. There you come to fully appreciate
the shorter "Kreutz", much softer and lyrical, but always
transcending to the very limit of deep listening. The final "Darul
Kabap" is genuine powerbook real-time improvisation, crossing
voices, samples and electronics, giving backbone to the rhythm
of world's heartbeat, mixing lots of strange idioms and ideas
right from Carl's head for the joy of our inner ear.
-- Massimo Ricci
Touching Extremes may be found at: http://www.touchingextremes.org/