Never Give Up On The Margins Of Logic

For London's Freedom of the City Festival Mattin's Sakada materializes in a big band incarnation. Unexpectedly, the larger the group, the smaller the sound. In contrast to Sakada's dense previous recordings as the trio of Mattin, Prévost and Rosy Parlane, here the expanded Sakada navigate a more restrained and open territory. Droning passages rise and ebb in blocks, the sound folding over on itself, while minute textures dance on the edges. The emphasis on bowed sounds (Prévost's cymbals, Davies' harp, Garcia's bass, Wastell's objects and Mattin's computer casing (!!!)) brings to mind the slow churning of a Morton Feldman composition, yet mutated further into the realm of the unexpected and abstract. This recording finds a group as attuned to the space in between as they are to each other. An intense document of precisely restrained improvisation.

"Planes converge and intersect, bowed and rubbed into existence, shadowed by a hatch of rustles and rumbling. There's almost diagrammatic clarity to a mobile structure of tensions that charges the music, a structure of unplayed and unplayable elements that exists virtually yet vitally in relationships between sounds that can actually be heard. At the same time, correspondence and contrast within the fabric of the piece, its fibre and textured substance, are crucial. The outcome is restrained but not reductive; music as a material process, galvanised by the current of collective attentiveness."

- Julian Cowley, The Wire #248

"...these whines, grumbles, and contact mic clicks coalesce into a slow-roiling surge that suggests both the gradual melting of some dirty glacier and Feldman's Rothko Chapel reworked for Luigi Russolo's mythical noise contraptions."

- Joe Panzner, Grooves 015

"...an uncommonly beautiful set, all ears directed inward, listening for the next breath just drawn from the air."

- Jon Dale, Stylus Magazine, July 2004