Eve Egoyan - Hopeful Monster (2023)

In experimental music, artists are often praised for taking risks, yet it's seldom that the conditions that inspire and enable their plunges into yet-unknown realms are discussed. The powerful music found on Hopeful Monster, the partnership between acclaimed Toronto-based pianist Eve Egoyan and Costa Rican-born, British composer-musician Mauricio Pauly (who now lives and works in Vancouver), is a testament to the vitality of these very conditions.

Their collaboration began in 2018 when Pauly visited Egoyan's Toronto studio to improvise informally. There was an uncanny immediacy that emerged throughout this initial session. The mutual sense of trust, curiosity, and reciprocity was so potent that it carried them through four years of remote audio-file-swapping until their subsequent encounter. The occasion of this second meeting: recording this very album.

The music on Hopeful Monster is audibly propelled by their spontaneous interaction—the exchanges feel improvised inasmuch as they radiate urgency and wonder, or even that aforementioned glimmer of risk. However, it's also grounded—deeply so—in a distinctive joint vision, one that imparts cohesion, intricacy and exerts evocative weight. Yet this apparent vision isn't so much the product of Egoyan and Pauly's intense scrutiny and discussion about what they're doing. In fact there was precious little deliberation and premeditation involved in what's presented on this album. Instead, it sprung directly from the close-knit dynamic that established itself in their earliest music-making.

- Nick Storring