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Walt Shaw & Jim Tetlow — Towards Momentum
(Discus Music 9012DL, 2025, DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-06-17

Towards Momentum Cover art

We last caught up with this improvisational duo on their 2023 release Inner Skull Trail, and Towards Momentum, the 2025 follow-up to that earlier release, is certainly no less strange, no less interesting, as Shaw (primarily a percussionist, here primarily on a drum kit, along with gongs, electronics, hand percussion, and a “stripped down autoharp,” no doubt with some electronic effects) and Tetlow (laptop-based sounds along with cajon and electronics) make excellent use of unusual timbral varieties and free space in real time, creating as they go. The four long improvisations are each between thirteen and nineteen minutes, and are bound to go just about anywhere the mind can wander, through dreamy swells and forest carpets, meandering through shadowy strangeness and out into the starfield. Even though both players are effectively percussionists, the listener won’t find a lot of regular cadences herewithin except on the closing track “Rupture and Coalescence” — and only in the final minutes at that. Instead they approach their instruments with more of an explorative character, bouncing ideas off of one another as they drift freely through their own creation. What is most surprising is the almost complete absence of stringed instruments, woodwinds, of any kind, piano or keyboards, the sounds at hand are mostly textural and fragmentary, and if anything melodic is heard, I’m sure it’s probably accidental, like electronic sounds getting somehow tangled up together, or even reverberating bells. Many of the sounds seem like elements of field recordings or samples, but don’t even try and figure out what any of it is — you’ll go crazy if you try, and you won’t enjoy the essence of Shaw and Tetlow’s exploration. Just accept the sonic fabric for what it is, put on your headphones and dim the lights down low.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Walt Shaw, Jim Tetlow

More info
http://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/towards-momentum-9012dl-2025

 

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