So this is the free improv duet I mentioned yesterday. On the journey back, Clodagh decided to pick a CD at random from the glove compartment. The first one she came up with was this one. "Ah, now that one… that's free improv: you may not…" I didn't need to complete the sentence. Both passengers agreed that this random selection thing was not going to work. I think we ended up with an old mix CD I did for last year's Lake District holiday, featuring Marissa Nadler, Susanna, Frida Hyvönen, Samara Lubelski and Candie Payne. Followed by Lucy's 17 Hippies CD
I can't complain at my companions' lack of enthusiasm. I've had the CD for nearly two years (I got it the same day as this Discus release and this one) and had to tear off the cellophane before putting it in the glove compartment.
I got it because I wanted to check what Neil Carver was up to, not having heard anything he'd recorded since Wire Assembly in 1987. Answer: a more or less straightforward — if anything in improv can be called straightforward — extension of his earlier interests in adapting unusual toys and gizmos as musical instruments. Here these gizmos include the boxophone, apparently "music boxes joined in temporary union with a ukulele".
And having got used to Martin Archer confounding my expectation and memories with his astonishing range and versatility, his playing on this album is pretty close to how I remember the performances of his that I saw in the eighties and nineties.
None of this is to say that the album is a disappointment or a tired re-tread. I haven't yet got to know it well, but I can tell it's neither of those things. It's just not the kind of thing you'd want to play on a car journey, to people you don't know very well. In the right environment, right time, right mood, it'll be just the ticket.
The cover is Neil's photo of the Ring of Brodgar, spelled "Brodger" on the cover for some reason.
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