Duophonic Landscape is a sleekly atmospheric improv album, which nicely shifts between the moody and cinematic, to ritual tipped and darting, through to bounding-yet-angularly showy. It’s a seven-part / track CD release appearing on Klanggalerie- with the CD coming in a glossy colour digipak that features abstractly smeared and blurred light/ colour artwork, which nicely fits the shifting-playful, yet atmospherically moody flow of the album.

A little about the two artists here- we have Elisabeth Harnik, an Austrian based pianist and composer who has been active since the early 2000s, releasing thus far near twenty releases. Her body of work shifted and hazed genre boundaries- with many of her releases been collaborative. Andrea Centazzo is an Italian-born American composer, percussionist, multimedia artist and record label founder- he’s been active since the early ’70s with an impressive one hundred and thirty plus releases to his name- he’s worked with the likes Don Cherry, John Zorn, Steve Lacy, and Lol Coxhill

For this album, Harnik is playing piano and objects, and Centazzo percussion, mallet kat, and sampler. The album takes in seven tracks, and these each run between four and nine minutes apiece. We begin with “Duophonic Landscape #1” with its slow-rolling blend of buzzing and vibrating tones, skirting and shifty ritual percussion, and rising male chants.   With “ Duophonic Landscape #4 “ we find a tightly woven mix of bounding piano, cascading tap, knock and simmer. And by “Duophonic Landscape #6” we have vividly cascading jazzy piano runs, edged with detailed percussive structures, sudden smarting hisses, rattling twitches. The albums finished off with “ Duophonic Landscape #7” where we begin with darting low end bound keys, scrape and fiddle, and ritual vibe percussion- before in its second half shifting into Reich like interlocking/ flowing key and quirky percussive shakes and shifts.           

Duophonic Landscape is a decidedly sleek and carefully executed example of the improv form- and this has both its pros and cons. On the positive side the perfectly tooled/ controlled sonic elements create a largely rewarding twisting and turning maze of sound. On the less positive side of things, it sometimes feels a little too shiny/ polished rather lacking danger, and the suddenly lose/ noisy side of improv, which makes the form so invigorating to listen to.