ALEX Cunningham / PATRICK Shiroishi /JESSICA Ackerley/ DAMON Smith - [five lines indecipherable]

A vivid late night live session from 4 of modern improvised music's sharpest and most expressive spirits - recorded January, 2023.

In the fragmented poems of Sappho, Eros is abstruse and elusive - the closer we seem to come, the more unknowable the idea becomes. As the poems break off, Eros resists surveillance and direct apprehension - the fragment an invitation and dissolution into wonder. It is in a similar nebulous space that the quartet of Alex Cunningham, Patrick Shiroishi, Jessica Ackerley and Damon Smith gambol in undefined possibilities outside of the logic of continuity. In flight from the static pins of intelligibility, the quartet here flutter like wild moths refusing to be tacked to lifeless observational taxonomies. Across four pieces of suspended midnight vividness the music here is like Eros in the works of Sappho both exploring space and silence and shaking the mind like ‘mountain wind falling on the oak trees.'

released November 3, 2023

Alex Cunningham - violin

Patrick Shiroishi - alto saxophone

Jessica Ackerley - electric guitar

Damon Smith - double bass

Recorded and mixed by Ryan Wasoba

Mastered by Andrew Weathers

Art and Design by Ben Chlapek and Matthew Crook

Titles are fragments by Sappho with brackets where words are missing. Translations by Guy Davenport from 7 Greeks. (New Directions)

released by Profane Illuminations:

Available here.