Jacob Wick & Brad Henkel - Lovely Bag You Have (2020)

"I love your shirt" opens the album with a quick-changing sequence of contrasting textural exchanges. A sound rather like a kitten's mew counters a fuzzy eruption, then a pipe-scouring squall counters an elongated burr, setting up a dynamic of call and response, which suggests that one either musician relies upon a jazz-rooted sound palette, their shared backgrounds in jazz still influence their understanding of musical interaction.

The duos exchanges are sufficiently spirited that you might even call them hot. And when they spend the set matching long hisses that bridge the gap between the modular synths and bleeding radiators, and then transition to what sounds like a tangled duel for amplified bassoon and alarm buzzer (presumably obtained by playing close to their microphones with metal mutes), the notion of hot music takes on other connotations. But what makes this music magnetic after the novelty wears off is the attunement between two instant composers whose organizing instincts are very much in sync. Bill Meyer - The Wire