Ken Vandermark & Paal Nilssen-Love - Lightning Over Water (2014)

Tracklist:

01. Farewell To Language
02. The Table That Exploded
03. Face Value
04. A Storm Of Images
05. Five Against The House
06. Wrong Number
07. Through The Breakers

Ken Vandermark-B-flat clarinet, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone
Paal Nilssen-Love-drums, percussion

[quote]"This double LP + 7" is a result of two nights of live performance at the Dragon Club in Poznań, Poland in October 2011. The recording captures the duo at the peak of their tour and the result is mindblowing. Ninety-five minutes of playing-time spread out onto 2 LPs and a 7" single. Total running time of the concerts was 200 minutes, so this is only a snippet of the two evenings. The LPs and 7" come in a specially-designed cardboard box.

Paal Nilssen-Love (drums) and Ken Vandermark (reeds) started their collaboration in 2000 when the group School Days was formed. Since that time, they have worked together in many other groups, including FME, the Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Lean Left (with Terrie Ex and Andy Moor), iTi (with Thomas Lehn and Johannes Bauer), Fire Room (with Lasse Marhaug) and with Vandermark as a guest in The Thing (which includes Mats Gustafsson and Ingebrigt HÃ¥ker Flaten).

Despite all of this activity, from early on it seemed like a natural idea for them to also pursue a duo format as a vehicle for performance. This work began during the summer of 2002, when they recorded the album, Dual Pleasure for the label Smalltown Supersound. Since then, the duo has toured the USA, Canada, Europe and Japan several times. Their musical approach to playing in the duo context is ferocious in its intensity, a stylistic maelstrom that combines extreme rhythmic velocity with formal deconstruction and re-assembly. In many ways, Nilssen-Love and Vandermark are more unleashed in this setting than any of their other playing situations, creating an environment for improvised music that is riveting for both its ideas and execution."-Laurence Family