Weird recording for Mikroton featuring a duo recording of Keith Rowe and Alfredo Costa Monteiro and a quartet recording of them with Ilia Belorukov and Kurt Liedwart, two recordings made at the same day at spina!studio in St. Petersburg during Teni Zvuka 2013 festival.

Keith Rowe is mainly known as the pivotal and crucial musician standing in the forefront of the first wave of the European free improvisation, co-founder of AMM in 1965 and inventor of tabletop guitar playing techniques which remained his central sound tool until now and which he extended with a lot of electronic and other gadgets and devices. It’s his third release on our label following “Shifting Currents” with Bill Thompson and Rick Reed and his composition “A Quartet For Guitars” performed last winter in 2013 with his Nantes colleagues Emmanuel Leduc, Anthony Taillard and Julien Ottavi, the quartet which is known as NG4 Quartet.

Alfredo Costa Monteiro is a musician with almost the same biographical details which you find in Rowe’s, both studied art and unexpectedly moved to music and sound art worlds. He’s mainly interested in unstable processes and raw gestures, often manipulating objects as instruments and instruments as objects what you actually hear in his playing manner of accordion here. He works in other projects like Cremaster with Ferran Fages, I Treni Inerti, Astero and 300 Basses.

Ilia Belorukov hails from St. Petersburg and works mainly with prepared saxophone in the field of improvised, noise and electroacoustic music. He’s a member of different projects like Wozzeck, Wooden Plants and others. He practices an experimental approach of sound extraction on alto saxophone and uses laptop, electric guitar, drums and other instruments. He also runs our partner Intonema label and organizes with us Teni Zvuka festival in St. Petersburg and Moscow.

In 2009 he joined his forces with Kurt Liedwart, a Moscow-based musician and curator of Mikroton Recordings and organizer of Teni Zvuka festival. When the duo started Liedwart was using only sinewaves and field recordings adding more sounds and noises with time. Liedwart works mainly with computer, electronics, synthesizer and objects, sometimes deleting the line separating concerts from performances or installations, at the same time he’s active in the fields of electroacoustic improvisation and sound art.

In 2013 Kurt Liedwart with Ilia Belorukov decided to invite Keith Rowe and Alfredo Costa Monteiro to the 4th edition of Teni Zvuka festival. It was the first time when they played at the festival’s recording sessions together in duo and in quartet with Ilia Belorukov and Kurt Liedwart. Their duo recording forms an exchange of personal experiences that bring the music into rather dry territories, with an acute sense of musicality. They conjured a unique sound world with accordion and prepared guitar, combining different sound qualities at the same moment. The quartet recording goes even beyond prevalent methodologies of working with sound, unpushingly pushing the sound around and violating many rules of the nowadays improvisation.