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I've enjoyed this recording since the beginning many years ago, but the more I listen to it, still the more I like it. Being a long time [since the early 1990's] fan of Raoul Björkenheim's work(s), this is probably the second best. The best, as much as I can remember, is Double Concerto for violin and electric guitar, seen only in Finnish television in the late 1990's. However, as a guitar showcase, this is on the very top.
Don't get me wrong, this duo recording is not an ego-thing. As much as Björkenheim is - almost comically - fond of certain technical aspects of [electric] guitar playing, his playing still avoids the danger of being self-indulgent. Besides, despite those referred-to techniques [=a taste for a strange kind of tapping] he has a beautiful technical mastery of, say, prepared guitar, slide or bow playing. In this collection, he plays also a bowed string instrument specially designed for him, and he plays it well.
Judging from here, Lucas Ligeti is a high class master drummer, and the best of him could as well be his beautifully complex and skillfully crafted polyrhythms, his knowledge of African or East Asian rhythms and timbres, or his mastery in blending all his different influences both _within_ his personal style and as contentually separate parts, elements unified in the course of his drumming performance of each track.
The sound quality of the recording is excellent [as always in TUM Records] and the mix is very good. The tone colors range from dark or bright-as-happy to parts that are of a quirky, _strange_ character, but with enough reality to make the sound not too strange. The sounds (as well as the rhythms and melodies) produced follow very well the titles of the pieces. There are no effects except the basic guitar wahwah and overdrive - the playing gives the content.
This is one of the best 15 records I've ever heard, e.g. among the symphonies and rAgas that I've heard recorded. If you'd like challenging but very listenable, complex but utmostly melodious, no-nonsense music that reveals the musical souls of the players really well as well as something of the higher planes of our creative existance, and is all-through peaceful even when in fury, then high chance is that you'd like this record. Very much, indeed.
