3 out of 5

Label: Un Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi

Produced by: Brice Kartmann

A fascinatingly loose percussion experiment… and then maybe a somewhat boring percussion experiment.  But it’s half and half, 20 minutes a piece, so that’s not a horrible ratio for a single instrument improv jam.

The ‘Batterie Fragile’ is apparently a porcelain drumset.  For the ten minutes of improvisation n°2, player Valentina finds all the different sounds such a set can make, starting off with rolling, tippa-tapping before moving outward into more experimental territory, granting a grooving shape to the work done leading up to it.  It’s an excellent tour de force of style, but as a result of this gamut, improvisation n°3 has nothing to build on.  Valentina attempts to make this second ten minutes an exploration of negative space, spreading out the tip-taps and breaking down the rhythm as much as possible, which is certainly valuable from an observational / technical point of view, but admittedly not very engaging after the more streamlined preceding track.

Still an interesting listen overall, and with half of its runtime a pretty dominating, relistenable force.