Rose Tang & Patrick Golden — A White Horse Is Not a Horse

A White Horse Is Not a Horse arrives on CD in a card gatefold wallet from the esteemed ESP-Disk, featuring five tracks varying from about four minutes in length to twenty-four minutes. Tang and Golden present improvised pieces which largely revolve around similar sounds and techniques - certainly from Tang, who performs with electric guitar, piano, electric keyboard, vocals, and small percussion, whilst Golden assaults the drums

The first track, ‘Silence死 Violence死’, introduces the album with poetic exclamations from Tang, repeated phrases, looped and altered, tumbling over each other, adorned with low-end sound poetry techniques - hissing sibilance - accompanied by Golden’s sympathetic drumming. Within about ten seconds I knew I had heard this before somewhere, and after a lot of digging found that I had reviewed Tang’s trio Attitude! a while back. That review wasn’t favourable, and unfortunately I’ll be repeating that pattern here. ‘WW3’, the following track, is initially more promising but outstays its welcome somewhat; here Tang plays guitar only, deploying a multitude of effects, and whilst at points the processing is effectively used, at other points the effects dominate and the guitar becomes much less interesting for it. Certainly by the end there is a sense that Tang is just pedal-jumping, but without building anything overly compelling. The third piece, ‘Active. Passive. Voice!’, combines the two preceding tracks in terms of approach, with Tang’s words accompanied by her guitar - and of course Golden’s percussion. Here the guitar work is perhaps more interesting, but very much relegated in volume terms behind the vocals which play out like word association games; Golden cooks up a real storm but Tang doesn’t ascend with them. The title track oddly echoes the Attitude! album, which also features one long piece where Tang performs on the piano, so ‘A White Horse Is Not a Horse’ is indeed twenty-four minutes of piano and drums. Tang’s playing is animated and knotty, atonal banging; it benefits from the absence of distracting processing - though there are small percussive sounds throughout which might well be extra percussion or close-mic’d prepared piano, it’s unclear. These added textures do create some effective layered passages, however, sometimes the close mic’d qualities of the sounds, and pronounced panning, stand them very apart from the piano and drums; sometimes this disturbs the listening, at other points it adds to it. Saying that, around the twenty-one minute mark the sound of the piano seems to alter dramatically, swelling briefly and occupying a different position in the soundfield, so perhaps there is some processing or mic-work going on. Near the end Tang introduces vocalisations, long wails that waver, building to vocal histrionics but nothing that ultimately holds much weight. ‘Devolution Revolution’ is up next, beginning with a barrage of (I think) processed electric keyboard, soon joined by Tang’s vocals and Golden’s drums. Again, the words follow the established pattern of words exclaimed one by one, linked by meaning or spelling - it’s tired already; however, Tang starts to add effects to her vocals, at points becoming slightly saturated, leading to sections that do build to something chaotic or noisy - fulfilling promises inherent in the duo. The final piece, ‘Hexadelic’, begins with subdued keyboards and vocalisations from Tang, before things get more kinetic and she plays piano and keyboards simultaneously - all accompanied by Golden who remains constantly creative and dynamic.

A White Horse Is Not a Horse has its moments, but doesn’t consistently build to anything, for my ears. Golden is a joy throughout - looking about, they have some nice releases, including a duo with Daniel Carter - but Tang’s contributions rarely match up. Her approach promises colourful chaos but is curiously earthbound for the most part - it reaches towards vigorous freedom, creativity, and expanse but never really gets there.