ARK |cs237

"Verwandlung", that is "transformation", is the first release on Creative Sources by ARK, an awesome collaborative distaff project by Swiss musicians Coralie Lonfat, whose classical and jazz studies got integrated by an educational path within electronic and experimental woods with good guides such as laptop virtuosos Dafna Naphtali and Ikue Mori, and Nathalie Huber, who focused on sound design, field recordings and experimental music after studying piano at the Academy of Fribourg with Veronique Piller and graduating in Composition and Arrangment at the School of Jazz in Lausanne. These skilled girls go through many interesting sonic strategies in order to let their delicate hybridizations infiltrate beyond listener's sensibility and render their own continual musical metamorphosis - from noise to harmony, from single tone to melodies, from resounding objects to meaning, from inorganic to organic - since the opening track "Trajectoire", where the crystalline delicacy of the first moments got stinged by piano tonal twangs, which add plumbean shades to ARK's vibe. A sequence of spectral sonic apparitions, pealing fissures, anxious melodic flashes, wind-up hatchets and cleaving noisy entities on three untitled tracks plow the soil for the tonal cloudiness of "Contrepoint", the icily mesmerizing sonic chrysalis of "Arctiidae", while the electroacoustic crackling discharges of the seventh untitled track sound like having been canalized in the beautiful "Conductivite'". They allow a break for knitting on "Socken stricken mit silberner Wolle" (German for "Socks knit with silver wool") before the quick-frozen electroacoustic assay of "Vereiste Gluhbirne", whose brilliance seems to reverberate on the delicately spellbinding stroking of the eleventh closing untitled track. Vito Camarretta (Chain DLK)

Ark is a Swiss free improvisation duo consisting of Coralie Lonfat on laptop and Nathalie Huber on piano, objects, and harmonium. Recorded in November 2012, this album features short segued pieces that delicately explore well-defined sound palettes. The music drones and tinkles, caressing eardrums while tickling brain cells. The perfect listen at 8 am. François Couture (Monsieur Delire)