Here is a rather odd record - though not in a crazed or obvious way - from a Seoul based duo on piano ( Jiyeon Kim) and drums (Sangyong Min). Snow features six tracks, all except one being reasonably short, of often minimal, often sparse duets, which feel composed rather then improvised. The pieces are disarmingly simple, and the piano is often supremely simplistic, setting up a strange tension with the more complex percussion from Min.

The first track, the title piece, sets out 11min’s stall, with bare, single note melodies that ring out through the piano’s sustain pedal, over much busier drums. The drums have a clipped sound, through the use of brushes, giving the performance an angular feel, like a metronomic, sometimes fidgety, funk - akin to the layered rhythms of electronica; whilst the piano melodies are odd, sometimes cryptic in a rather bland way, as if they are merely the root notes of a composition made sense of with fully fleshed out chords. It’s a strange combination.

The second track, ‘gust,’ begins with cascading arpeggios from the piano, in stark contrast to the preceding piece, but still presents a minimalist offering. The drums here are processed, slowed, reversed, and threatening to burst over into noise - but they don’t. ‘Stone,’ the third track, aims at the stately elegance of the Necks or the Esbjörn Svensson Trio, as perhaps much of the album does, but the drums and piano clash - in my mind at least. The drums often overpower the piano, in terms of content, almost as if the piano lines are a click track for the drums. In this sense, the piano sometimes sounds redundant - though the track does finish with a united ending where the duo come together. ‘Lowdrum’ has really nice drums sounds - again that sense of electronica/etc being referenced by 11min, and the piano here does become slightly agitated, though the track ends with a somewhat trite piano flourish which sounds plain bad to me.

The last two pieces on the album are different to what came before. ‘Snow keeps falling (snow REMIX)’ is just that, a 14 minute long remix by 11 which essentially retreads the album but somehow makes more sense. It presents a long form piece that can be dipped into and out of, as background listening. That’s not remotely any criticism - the entire album plays with the notion of minimalism, ambience, furniture music. The last track, ‘loose,’ also sounds like it’s electronically constructed rather than played live acoustically. It features sparse vocalisations, and a processed drum sound that sounds like the pleasing industrial plastic ‘thonk’ you might find on an Einstürzende Neubauten album. The piano here becomes more florid, but the vocals sound a tad incongruous, an ill-fitting collage.

This is a strange record. It feels composed rather than improvised, and in that respect there’s not a huge amount of tension - to my ears at least; instead you have a deliberate juxtaposition of the sparse, resonating piano and the active, bustling drums. However, it’s hard to know what to make of it; as stated, it doesn’t have the energy or tension you might associate with an improv record, nor does it have, or appear to aim at, the atmospherics of Bohren & der Club of Gore, for example; so snow is an oddly formal record, which does grant it an atmosphere that approaches stately minimal ambience, but I feel it doesn’t achieve this fully, not least because of the sense that the duo’s playing ‘fights’ each other. I’m convinced that if snow was transformed into a solo piano record and a solo percussion record, both would be superb; the first would have a Satie-esque simplicity and grandeur, whilst the second would just display some very beautiful drumming. The record does conjure up snowfall quite perfectly: that sense of slowed time and quiet, which actually comes about through constant, relentless kineticism - however, in selfish terms it doesn’t translate into a overly compelling listening experienc