Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble - Toward the Margins (1996)

British saxophonist Evan Parker was one of the first musicians to record for ECM, appearing on the label's fifth album in 1970 as a member of the Music Improvisation Company; his partners in that collective included Stockhausen associate and electronic composer Hugh Davies.

Over the past three decades, electronics have been one of Parker's abiding interests and his collaborations both with improvisers using electronics and with composers of electronic music have been many. In 1992 he formed the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble to explore more fully the potential of live electronics in improvisation, a potential that has grown as the technology has become more sophisticated.
The Ensemble pools musicians from the worlds of free improvisation, jazz, contemporary composition and computer music research, with most of its members straddling more than one idiom or area of activity. The Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble has toured widely, and its North American debut at the Victoriaville Festival was widely hailed as the event's highlight: "An orchestral music of panoramic scope, full of spatial detail...cascading layers of morphing transmutations ... the electronic manipulations charged the music with a sense of spontaneous discovery" - Cadence, "Ardent ... grandly ambitious ... broadly sweeping schemes, mating improvised activity with MIDI-fied crosstalk" - Jazz Times.
There is a great deal of slowly-evolving tone colour and space, with the opening track almost entirely textural and hung around Guy's sonorous bass. Sepulchral gong-sounds echo behind Parker's whirling soprano sax, there are spooky percussion solos of slithery whispers and sounds like buckets of broken glass being emptied onto concrete, and the leader's remarkable capacity for contrapuntal solo playing acquires even more voices as the electronics echo it. Serious play, in every respect. John Fordham, The Guardian (Jazz CD of the Week)

Evan Parker - soprano sax, gong
Barry Guy - double-bass
Paul Lytton - percussion, live electronics
Philipp Wachsmann - violin, viola, live electronics, sound processing
Walter Prati - live electronics, sound processing
Marco Vecchi - live electronics, sound processing

1. Toward the Margins
2. Turbulent Mirror
3. Field and Figure
4. The Regenerative Landscape (for AMM)
5. Chain of Chance
6. Trahutten
7. Shadow Without an Object
8. Epanados
9. Born Cross-Eyed (Remembering Fuller)
10. Philipp's Pavilion
11. The Hundred Books (for Idries Shah)
12. Contra-Dance

Recorded in May 1996 at Gateway Studios
Released in 1997 by ECM

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