Natalia Kamia, Stewart Miller, and other invisible entities
“We jammed on our little green aircraft”
We welcome back Natalia Kamia on eg0cide, a few years after her collaborative work Cluster with Ayato. This time she teamed up with Stewart Miller from USA Both of them have studied music in academic settings, but in order to expand the expressive potential of their crafts, they have turned to utilizing extended techniques for their main instruments – for Natalia the piano, for Stewart guitars – and using objects/processes that were probably never intended to be musical. All of the tracks from their album “We jammed on our little green aircraft” were compiled from recordings that they had passed back and forth through the internet.
The result of this collaboration is a fresh & intriguing work that deliberately ignores the traditional hierarchies between sounds and focuses on attending to their particularities, without trying to polish them too much. Stewart and Natalia are not afraid of collisions. Their music passes by the non-contradiction principle and the narrow conceptions of music as “harmony”; their sounds dance, float, slip, crash and start running again without following a precisely perceivable logic: you just have to accept them as they come & go. They form a dizzy, unstable world that is in the same time very material and completely unreal, sometimes joyously agitated, sometimes more restrained and plaintive. These tunes often keep some kind of twisted groove, as in some forms of free jazz.
I won’t pretend to know who or what the “other invisible entities” credited as co-creators of the album might be, but having listened to it several times I’ve realized that even goldfishes might learn to sing, and that plants need to pee sometimes. Maybe we just have to experiment with different ways of feeding pianos and guitars ? “Meow!” answered the swinging spoons…