Kyle Bruckmann: oboe/English horn
Tom Djll: trumpet
Jacob Felix Heule: floor tom
Kanoko Nishi-Smith: koto
Brittle Feebling prickles and bleats, an abrasive delicacy. Fricative rasp and withheld breath seethe together in a discomfiting cuddle. Perfectly respectable instruments born of classicisms both Euro and Nippon are recast, glanced at askance, as the misbegotten miscreants of Imperialisms they (also) are.
This album arises from a most quixotic endeavor: the tenuous, long-term maintenance of a freely improvising collective, comprising unreasonably busy artists, within a scene largely devoted to the peripatetic ad hoc and a culture at large that could hardly care less. Brittle Feebling is the first documentation of this particular quartet subset, although sub-subset precedents include Addleds, whose album Mottle came out in 2013.
The four of us find it terribly lovely, and we hope you might as well.
released October 2, 2020
recorded May 12 and June 24, 2018 in Berkeley, California
recorded, mixed, and mastered by Jacob Felix Heule
drawings and layout by Theresa Currie
“Good, tough improv–spiky and uncomfortable here, almost–almost–calm and expansive there, active and needle-sharp while allowing air into the room.” – Brian Olewnick
“Sounds scrape, and burble, and whoosh, and bubble, leaving the listener to ponder “who did that?” Oboe becomes a theremin. Koto morphs into a squirrel. Trumpet shows aspects of synthesizer control. Floor tom becomes viola. . . One never quite knows which instrument is playing what, and that it’s really quite pleasurable to experience. Concepts such as “chops” get left in the dust as these players dig deeply into their individual sound worlds. These worlds then mesh into sublime musical omniverse.” – Disaster Amnesiac