Suspended

Improvisation assumes a fresh experience, an unfamiliarity with what is to come, a disruption of expectations. How much more intense and disorienting the experience becomes in the music of Markus Eichenberger and Daniel Studer. Each one has an impressive résumé of musical adventures, but as a duo their music expresses special qualities and asks challenging questions. Suspended offers no customary structures, no consistent prototypes; the titles are not instructions, illustrations, or explanations. Manipulating an abstract dialect of sounds, many of them in the grey area between recognizable pitch and expressive noise, they initiate a system of relationships that allows - requires - the listener to participate in the spontaneous search for meaning.