LUIGI ARCHETTI/BO WIGET
Low Tide Digitals III
RCD2087
Rune Grammofon 2009
14 Tracks. 68mins18secs

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For the third time in eight years, guitarist Luigi Archetti and cellist Bo Wiget have joined forces for the time of an album, continuing their sonic explorations at the confines of modern classical, experimental jazz and minimal electronic, following Low Tide Digitals I and II, published in 2001 and 2005 respectively, already on Rune Grammofon.

The two Swiss residents are very well established artists in their own right. Italian-born Archetti has been an active member of German psychedelic band Guru Guru for the last twenty years, and he also work as a painter and multi-media artist, while Wiget studied cello at the Feldkirch Academy and has since worked with various musicians and formations, often in the field of improvisation, and also occasionally moonlights as a theatre actor. The pair first worked together in 1995 when they were both part of improv outfit Affront Perdu, which led them to collaborate on their own common project a few years later.

Low Tide Digitals III follows the format of its predecessors, the fourteen tracks collected here, sequenced Stück 24-37, resulting of improv sessions where acoustic, electric and electronic components are tightly woven together to form impressive textural atmospheric pieces. While the first two instalments in the Low Tide Digitals series sometimes blurred the boundaries of the pair’s respective contributions, this latest outlines the extent of their musicianship more clearly. Wiget’s inputs provide this album with much depth, his cello, in turn mournful (Stück 27, Stück 28, Stück 31), pastoral (Stück 25, Stück 35) or menacing (Stück 30), rippling through these tracks like seismic shocks, while Archetti is often found charging through with dense and abrasive clouds of distortions (Stück 30, Stück 33), although occasional low-end saturation sometimes bubble just below the surface, accentuating the emotional tension of some of these pieces (Stück 24, Stück 27, Stück 28). Occasionally, he adds brushes of mandolin to create a light counterpoint to his dark guitar overtones (Stück 32, Stück 34).

These improvisations often range from the truly poetic and exquisite to the dark and ominous, sometimes in the space of a few seconds, but the overall album is actually extremely balanced, between calm and density, between Archetti’s guitars, Wiget’s cello and their electronic treatments, between challenging and accessible. With this third opus, the pair appear to have opened up new grounds while remaining faithful to the previous instalments in this series, and they undoubtedly have much more to offer in the future.

4.6/5

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