Kevin Kastning & Carl Clements - Strand in Strands (2022)

Both Kevin Castning and Carl Clements are already familiar to our regular readers. Kevin is better, Carl is worse. Together they appeared on our pages when it was about the album Convergence II, created by the trio Kastning - Clements - Szabo. With the Hungarian Sandor Szabo, the talented American guitarist and designer of unique multi-string guitars Kastning has been doing joint projects for a long time. But Castning's collaboration with Massachusetts multi-instrumentalist Carl Clements also has a long history. The current album Strand in Strands is the sixth for this duo.

It is compiled from recordings that Kevin and Carl made at different times in 2021 and 2022, but at the same time it leaves the impression of a very solid work. Perhaps this is facilitated by the construction of the program, which begins and ends with two short, a little more than a minute of sounding, pieces with the characteristic names Resolution Pending and Pending Resolution, and between them there is almost an hour of sounding of large detailed compositions, where the musicians give the listeners the opportunity to evaluate their ideas and their ideas in detail. embodiment. Castning plays three types of guitars from his extensive collection, while Clements, who you might remember playing flutes in Convergence II, this time plays two types of saxophones - tenor and soprano.

I met with the opinion that Castning's works are close to the new age style. This seems very strange to me. At the very least, Strand in Strands is mostly free-form jazz. Listen to, for example, Magnetic Anistropy or The Weibel Instability - for my taste, this is real free jazz, although quite peculiar. Pauses in the music of Castning and Clemens play a role no less than the sounds themselves. And they both love long, viscous sounds, when the taken note is greatly stretched in time, and the sound dissolves into silence before the next one arises. Take, for example, A Question, Lingering, where, after the guitar intro, the sound of the saxophone floats in rarefied space, like an astronaut who has left his ship and ended up in outer space. The same can be said, for example, about Transparencies in Transition, a piece with a very lyrical opening from Carl Clemens, and from the point of view of a fan of guitar sound, for my taste, Castning is especially good at Interstitial Inquiries. It is unlikely that the music of these musicians can be called a product for the general public, but the circle of fans of the duet of Kevin Castning and Karl Clemens will certainly appreciate their new work.