Another stunningly beautiful package from Eli Keszler’s Rel Records. This one is the debut duo release from Keszler and Ashley Paul. Here Keszler plays bowed percussion and cymbals while Paul tears wild altissimo sustains from saxophone and clarinet, confusing the kind of static jazz minimalism of the Tamio Shiraishi/Sean Meehan duos with the sound art of Ikuro Takahashi and Harry Bertoia. The way Paul strains to modulate high, lonesome pitches has some of the melancholy grandeur of Kaoru Abe though the overall feel – constant high-tones spinning in clouds above subtle scrapes and roars - makes it feel closer to a more tactile take on eternal music than anything approaching free jazz. The dynamics of the flip are a ‘little’ more conventionally reed/drums, though Paul opts more for weird, inflating tones than anything approaching runs, while Keszler is more focused on expressive texture than time. The final track crosses strings with thuds of percussion that feels like a more improvised take on the electro-acoustic confusion of the first New Blockaders LP. Pressed on 160 gram copper plate pressed virgin vinyl, the record is housed in a black inner sleeve. The textured paper cover features a layered silk screened drawing while the inside contains grey pasted notes with an attached 8x24 inch three part multi-tone picture printed across a fold-out frosted vellum book. All silk screened, hand assembled and drawn by Ashley and Eli. The record comes in a limited hand numbered edition of 300 copies.

First in a series of live documents from Rel Records with the duo of Eli Keszler and Ashley Paul recorded live at Great Scott in Boston in May 2009. Released in a hand-numbered run of 135 copies and packaged with the usual stunning attention to detail we’ve come to expect from Eli/Rel, the set sees the duo apply drums, cymbals, alto saxophone, guitar, ‘green box’, banjo and bow to a series of instant settings that exist somewhere between The Revolutionary Ensemble, Iancu Dumitrescu and Einsturzende Neubauten. The compositions are complex, string and percussion heavy, generating bisecting lines of breath and collapsing rhythms that have a stately grandeur and an industrial weight while confusing sound art and avant composition with raw free jazz. Still the most thrilling inheritors of the whole underground/outside ESP-Disk aesthetic currently active.