Spontaneous Improvisations @ hcmf

"So, my first gig was a spontaneous collaboration between German keyboardist and composer Heiner Goebbels and guitar legend Fred Frith, whom he had only met 30 minutes before. Their music for piano and processed guitar seemed at first to complement the fractured and dissonant cityscape of capitalist Britain, such as circle the venue, in a probing, disenchanted conversation of provocation and response that raised each instrument to moments of transcendence, often driven by Frith’s mastery of rock guitar, both using and disassembling its authority.

But even this conversation between titans was, for me, upstaged three hours later when Goebbels improvised from the organ with saxophone maestro Raymond MacDonald. This inspired combination was a fight for supremacy that pitted the baroque against the modern, machine-powered flutings and rumbles against a single pair of human lungs, and in the grandeur of St Paul’s, Heaven itself against Satan, the Rebel Angel. To hear it was like witnessing a dramatic and ferocious version of Paradise Lost; Milton condensed down to its two major protagonists, both at full power.

MacDonald fought with furious flurries of sound and the melodic clarity of the sax against, so it seemed, the massed power of Protestant Christianity, eager to crush this serpentine escapee under its divine jackboot. This was a once-in-a-lifetime encounter between two fearless improvisers who, again, had only met minutes before the gig. To provoke, and to catch such music is the genius of HCMF, and both performances will be available to hear on Radio 3’s New Music show." Angus Reid @ Morning Star