Well, this is quite beguiling…
As much as I tend to love the dark and noisy, this is sunlight cast into hidden corners. A cleanly interlocking, organic piano architecture through which soprano-vines curl and insinuate; unhurried sculptures, all curves and sinuosity, occasionally bursting into finely detailed bloom.
Journeys without purpose, content to take joy in happened-upon surroundings – a flâneur’s stroll, a light appreciation complementing the spontaneously unfolding byways – apparently minimal but a contemplative pause reveals layers of entrancing detail. Implications of further unseen layers of potentially fractal delight, the sparse surface lines possessing a hidden-yet-felt design.
Then again, the architecture is constructed jointly… two master masons laying course after course, conjuring shape and structure without predictable blueprint, building one upon the other, closely elegant, climbing on a dare, avoiding symmetrical cliché to behold clean lines and subtle curlicues, zig-zag colonnades and sudden, brief friezes… piano and sax lines momentarily tightly wound in helical pinnacles of sound from which to take in the view.
As the seemingly spontaneous structures evolve, the passing landscape fascinates, the tone and sounds speak to some higher internal plane – erudite, uplifting; a subtle, seductive and subliminal enlightenment, detected only through the inner smile it produces.
Paris XI
Tendrils
Cornerwoman Blues
Diffraction Grating
Mindweaving
Mimesis
Minor Victories
Smoketrails
(44:59)
Catherine Sikora — soprano saxophone
Christopher Culpo — piano
The Paris Sessions, Volume 1: Mimesis is available for download via Catherine Sikora’s Bandcamp page.