Christine Abdelnour / Maya Magdas —The Setting Sun is Beautiful Because of All it Makes us Lose (Sofa)
Photo by Peter Gannushkin
Biography, methodology, and equipment aren’t destiny, but they can be orienting, so let’s start with the details. Alto saxophonist Christine Abdelnour and pianist Maya Magdas are both of Lebanese origin, but both have lived in Europe for most of their lives. Each woman’s first musical training was classical. This is their third album, following Teeming (Olof Bright, recorded in 2009) and Myriad (Unsound, recorded in 2011). Like its predecessors, The Setting Sun is Beautiful Because of All it Makes us Lose was improvised. In addition to playing without a score, Abdelnour and Mayas defy the conventions of their instruments; the former rarely plays familiar reed tones, and the latter is as reliant upon the various objects she places upon the strings as she is upon struck keys to get sound from her piano.
But knowing the parameters will only get you so close to comprehending the magnetism of the duo’s music. Even the word magnetism is a bit misleading, since it is independent of voltage. Nonetheless it draws the listener in, mentally projecting one’s ears into the spaces between the two women in order to become one with what they’re doing. All those wide-open options mean that there’s more material at hand for them to assemble like and unalike sounds into a canvas of vibrations, motions and timbres. Identities blur more than you might expect. While there’s no doubting that the saxophone produces purring and popping sounds, and the pinging notes come from the piano, the abraded, elongated metal sonorities could be from other musician. But if you can’t always tell who made the sounds, you can usually tell that two people are making them, except for the moments when each musician generates multiple sounds that make her sound like more than one person. But even then, there’s room around each element. Neither Mayas and nor Abdelnour operates under a compulsion to fill up the available space, nor do they submerge their individual identities. Instead they combine them into an interdependent mini-community.
