Tess Said So - Scramble + Fate

More Preserved Sounds! Yes readers, we have yet more lovingly hand-cobbled musics from the perennially card-enclosed limited edition label, this time coming from a pianist and a percussionist. Rasa Daukus and Will Larsen, as Tess Said So, here offer up a record of exquisite post-classical meanderings mixed with slow, doom-jazz inflections to evoke a day of unsettled weather in the countryside. Should I bring my fishing rod, my mac *and* my shorts? Oh all right, then. I guess that’s improvisation for you. Or is it..?

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The beauty of the duo dynamic lies here in the tinkling, twilit narrative brought by Larsen and his array of chimes and bells, juxtaposed with the bolstering power of the whole gamut of piano keys stroked from a whisper to a hammering scream by Daukus. They can do sky-ascending melody too, with tumbling piano rolling over staccato drums to crashing crescendo; moments of temporary ease are interspersed, teasing us up to an ultimately slow release -- see ‘Urgent Monday’ for that, something all of us here at the Towers are only too aware. Pretty moments stretch out across the record, abating the general tension, on the playful ‘So Long, Perfect’ and the starlit tranquility of ‘11.15’.

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8/10

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Read the review here.