Keith Rowe/John Tilbury: enough still not to know

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

John Tilbury (p)
Keith Rowe (tabletop g)

Label:

SOFA

Dec/Jan/2015/2016

Catalogue Number:

SOFA548

RecordDate:

17-18 July 2014

Kjell Bjørgeengen, visual artist and producer of this epic set, describes enough still not to know as “a place where things start to fall apart”. His summation is spot on. It's as if the two musicians here were busy breaching the very gateways of silence, atomising parades of austere passages into a series of ‘broken moments’. In Tilbury's case this means scattering his spare, lambent Feldman-esque tones, colouring the margins where Rowe's bursts of radio static seemingly cohere and then curdle into blankets of infinite hiss or blossom into disquieting Borgesian broadcasts. It's difficult to decide whether the frameworks of stillness are being adorned or adulterated (“to what purpose, disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves…?”). Pauses between events become increasingly protracted so that the presence of the former AMM associates is barely felt. The wounding shape of Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth manifests itself, a fissure slicing through cavernous halls of artistic endeavour, an aesthetic absence of the barest magnitude.

Follow us

Jazzwise Print

  • Latest print issues

From £5.83 / month

Subscribe

Jazzwise Digital Club

  • Latest digital issues
  • Digital archive since 1997
  • Download tracks from bonus compilation albums during the year
  • Reviews Database access

From £7.42 / month

Subscribe

Subscribe from only £5.83

Never miss an issue of the UK's biggest selling jazz magazine.

Subscribe

View the Current
Issue

Take a peek inside the latest issue of Jazzwise magazine.

Find out more