My recent CDR release, “Vendlam” with Doug Van Nort and Al Margolis received a couple nice reviews this month.

On his blog, Touching Extremes, Massimo Ricci wrote, “Barely grasping the elemental matter behind these aggregations of fizzling frequencies, coughing pulses, crepitant outgrowths and tortured strings means that the artists have trapped you in the impossibility of a definition….Chaos finally triumphs, mere minutes before the end.”

In Vital Weekly #938 Frans de Waard wrote, “It was quiet in the past weeks when it comes to releases on Attenuation Circuit (although they are active with download only releases), but here’s a new release of a trio of improvisers: Al Margolis (best known as the man from If, Bwana and label-boss of Pogus Productions) on violin and synthesizer, Eric Leonardsen on springboard, which is something he built himself and he plays with cello bows and homemade friction mallets and Doug van Nort on his laptop using Greis (pronounce ‘grace’) which he built using max/msp. They performed in concert on June 8, 2013 in My Pizza Place, Poughkeepise, NY as part of the Experimental Music Showcase. This all makes somehow quite an electronic work, especially in the final, title, piece things get pretty noisy and the music seems to be an imitation of the sounds of a train getting to a grinding hold. Quite enjoyable I think. In the opening piece, ‘Mandlev’, is much milder piece in which they scratch and scrape their instruments and it slowly builds up; it seems that the laptop needs time to heat up but once he’s there, he provides a nice backing to the piece, the mortar between bricks. In between ‘Lamvend’ is the shortest and acts a sort of bridge between the longer first and third piece, of slow and low humming sound. Quite a nice one, this one. Nice to see this on a CDR, but perhaps nicer would have been to actually witness the concert? This is, however, a nice souvenir of the event itself.”