Web & PR

‘Intersecting musical lines reveal their constituent points on alto saxophonist Mia Dyberg and trombonist Matthias Müller’s half-hour improvised duo, Wide Pointillism. Dyberg is prolific in the duo format, releasing Circumscription with pianist Marina Džukljev and Naboer with pianist Rieko Okuda in 2020, alongside her trio releases. (…) Both musicians maintain a reputation of remaining comfortable in a range of contexts, from fairly straight-ahead bands to textural soundscapes generated from extended techniques. Wide Pointillism is closer to the quieter, conceptual strain of echtzeitmusik, though not so unconventional as to obscure the identities of the instruments.

The music often plays to the title, utilizing these typically melodic instruments as rhythm machines to play pulses that can appear as lines at scale. A trombone line punctuated with silences reduces further to a flutter. A sustained sax tone distorts into peaks and valleys, like raw data around a curve, to become just the points by way of tongue slaps. Müller varies pressure to create discrete peaks in an otherwise continuous flow of sound. Dyberg employs what sounds like a metal mute to spotlight the jagged ends of vibrations during a sustained buzz. They both use objects against the instruments like a slow guiro for more pointillistic playing. The instrumental lines usually feel parallel but, as they disintegrate to points, can sound intertwined, contrapuntal. At one point, the trombone provides a backbeat for some virtuosic saxophone doodling; at another, roles reverse, and the saxophone lays down an urgent chopsticks for resonance-mimicking, circling glissandos from the trombone. The sound is recognizably saxophone and trombone, but with a healthy dose of textural variation from extended techniques. Dyberg’s melancholic intonations and Müller’s musical sniffs and valve-releasing-steam exhalations continue to serve as a kind of watermark for their styles. ‘ Keith Prosk, harmonic series