Stir

Guitarist Bill MacKay and cellist Katinka Kleijn are a pair of respected and accomplished musicians with a gift for improvisation, and they make an impressive team on their first collaborative project, 2019s STIR. Theres a confident give-and-take between the two artists and depending on their mood, they can weave languid patterns around one another, with the clear tone of MacKays guitar dancing gracefully with the deeper, richer voice of Kleijns cello, or engage in a brisk thrust and parry as he turns up the distortion and she scrapes her bow for all shes worth. As in most experimental improvisation pieces, STIR leans toward dissonance more often than clear melodic lines, but where some artists rely on skronk in this sort of context, MacKay and Kleijn appear to have little interest in noise for noises sake. The brittle tone of some passages is balanced by a surprisingly gentle spirit, especially on The Hermetic Circle, where Kleijns fluid technique and sustained notes give MacKay a comfortable foundation as well as a partner in creative conversation. And even though these pieces value emotion and inspiration over technique, STIR makes it clear MacKay and Kleijn have a remarkable command of their instruments, capable of tightly focused and challenging work as well as less-structured flights of fancy. MacKay and Kleijn have performed and recorded with a large number of musicians in their careers, but STIR reveals they push one another to especially imaginative and expressive work, and this collaboration hardly appears to have made use of all their inspiration just yet. ~ Mark Deming