De Haan/Spruit

De Haan/Spruit – Radical Improvisations:

Brian Marley, The Wire 289, March 2008

(…) Despite the album title’s boast, there’s nothing particularly radical about this music: the template for this kind of improvisation was set by Otomo Yoshihide, Christian Marclay and Martin Tétrault more than a decade ago, since when a host of others have followed their lead. But when is largely irrelevant; more important is how well it’s done. On the best of these pieces, such as “Take 28” and the relatively lengthy “Take 37”, Spruit and de Haan construct a well-proportioned, thoroughly arresting music that requires several listens before many of its nuances of expression are discernible. The last track, “Take 43”, ends where the CD began, with rapidfire exchanges, though now the players’ sound selections seem to fit together with an almost dreamlike precision.

Here are some nice words from Brian Olewnick on Bagatellen .

(...) The impression from the first three tracks is a variant of the sort of thing Otomo
Yoshihide and Martin Tetreault were engaged in a few years ago—
rapid-fire exchanges employing brief bursts of turntable noise and guitarisms.
Here it’s de Haan on the guitar and Spruit manning the turntable,
spitting out the sounds (…) the explosions emerging so
quickly that you imagine a puncture in some high-pressure mechanism.
(…) I can say that de Haan and Spruit accomplish such an approach
with competence and focus, especially with regard to clarity of sound;
each element is jaggedly edged and etched with extraordinary precision. (...)

And this is what Frans de Waard of Vital Weekly wrote about the release:

(...) There is indeed a certain noisiness about these nine pieces, but the two apply
a strong elements of collage to it. Sounds cut as brutally in and out, breaking the whole
thing up and down, with small portions of silence. (...) (FdW)