This knowing exchange of the husband-and-wife team of Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and American violinist Mark Feldman is imbued by the atmosphere of their New York home. Throughout, the endless chatter, flurries of bodies moving together and emotional outbursts of city life seem referenced. The 20-minute title track starts rudely; violin high and exasperated, piano answering back, as if a window was flung open on a row in the street. It sets the tone of these intimate duets; casual, heated or heartfelt dialogues of the day-to-day – violin and piano in conversation, direct and expressive, and sometimes so naked that it feels impolite to listen. Particularly striking is the grace of the piano-playing, even as Courvoisier stamps out angry chords, she's as a ballerina, just in a kick-boxing mode. Again and again, she pulls back, choosing her contributions carefully, an imaginative foil to the loquacious violin. There are flickers of sentimentality, the violin as the European immigrant, its long, drawn notes a shuddering cry for home, but everything is a snapshot, moving fast like urban thinking. The textures are so varied: sumptuous velvet arpeggios or homeless hemp-cotton bow strokes, the duo wringing out every conceivable nuance. On ‘Limits of the Useful’ there are gestural dots and crosses before the ink starts to flow and suddenly they join together in a beautiful swell. Their improvisations and compositions reference a past ‘modernism’ (at one point there is an exhale of Stravinsky's ‘Le Sacre du printemps’) and this brew of classical, jazz and other musics (they've both played with John Zorn, and Feldman has performed with Loretta Lynn) is not radical. Yet the album vibrates a metal thread connecting the earlier, tumultuous decades of 20th century Europe to the politics and emotions of today. They do this through their utter conviction in the clout of these instruments, unadorned.