Some formats I don't care for at all. But sax and drums I do. Interstellar Space laid the template for the format in an avant guise. So, when two experimental improvisers like Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey tackle the discipline there is a road map to be embraced or just as easily to be ignored. The last time the concept really worked and Brink really works too incidentally was Binker and Moses' Dem Ones which was far closer to the Coltrane and Rashied Ali model than is entered upon here. Brink is less ferocious (but certainly not for the faint of heart) than Coltrane and Rashied Ali's out-there masterpiece. In fact, what's here belongs to a different planet entirely given that both Laubrock and Rainey have long since sounded like nobody else but themselves.
These 13 tracks include 6 in the 'Brink' series. German saxist Laubrock is a different less obviously bravura player than Binker Golding. Also to her credit and like Golding in this regard she isn't a Coltrane copycat at all.
The more intense of the pieces are those involving soprano saxophone. And on the first of the 'Brink' pieces one even enters the Evan Parker universe a bit. But again it's all very much a Laubrock iteration of it timbrally and aesthetically.
Other tracks of this recording made in New York in April are actually not that avant at all - a low rumbling from Rainey set against meditative tenor on 'Coaxing' is abstract but not at all cold nor hermetically sealed as some more extreme and less clear headed improv can be. Best bits? The bell like tolling from Rainey on 'Liquified Columns' and the baby-like scream on both 'Brink' no. 2 and no. 5 is extraordinary from Laubrock. It's that kind of recording when lots of moments grab you by the lapels and force a reaction whether you end up pro or anti. Being indifferent to its formidable thesis is never really an option given the immediacy of what the duo cook up.
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