Together, pianist Sylvain Rey and guitarist Leando Lopez-Nussa make up Duo Reflections, a post-jazz pairing returning to the fray after a five-year gap with their sophomore album La Tregua.
Their sound is one of communion and discovery and this latest album draws together eight originals and one cover of an old Denis Badault track, and further pushes their adventures beyond the realms of jazz and into a silvery, reverb-filled dream world where rhythm and texture are amorphous things that ebb and flow with the mood.
The gentle harmonics in opener “Aube” have you bobbing like a boat full of light and space, circling, all shimmery and stretched. There is a playful, awkward gait to some of the other pieces and the interaction between guitar and piano has me thinking of Gastr Del Sol‘s halcyon days in the way the instruments pick at one another, then turn their back and look the other way.
Extraordinarily, the album was recorded in a day and captured to tape with one microphone, so the sense of immediacy and intimacy is in everything you hear, be it in the American back porch folk inflections of the title track or the bluesy canter of “Fo’ Blues”, where the guitar break is as energetic as things go here. There is some great freeform percussion on the body of the piano, while the high keening of the strings glisten in the shine of the bodywork.
“En Las Nubes” is all questing piano-led melancholy, although it isn’t all sweetness and light as the discord suffused through their cover of “For Karl” is enough to slightly unsettle. The piano’s pointillist shadows waver across the guitar on “Bobado” and the final track, with its deck of cards shuffle and frantic sense of tension, is quite an ending, giving you both sides of their diffuse coin before wrapping you up and sending you searching for more.
-Mr Olivetti-
