A Headful Of Birds

Product description Albüm içeri?i: The Tongue Has No Bone It 77’ Coming Out 105’ Sandstorm 130’ Thieves Bearing Thefts 53’ Farewell To Apes 223’ Thin-Ice-Skaters 38’ The Stirrings Of Old Gods 160’ Implicate Order 164’ Dresses For A Ne Moon Evenings 71’ Falling Stars 78’ Hearts Beseiged 35’ Mating Horses 120’ In The Pink Loft 54’ Bruised But Unbowed 56’ Wavy Trees 53’ Over-Familiar Rituals 116’ The Duke Of Grey 118’ Shanty Town 153’ Big Heads On Nemrut 44’ In The Birdhouse 94’ Dirt 150’ The Game’s Over 132’ Felix And The Adoration 204’ Curses Of A Forest-Dwelling Witch 64’ The End Of The Rainbow 129’ Labours Of Love 26’ True North 55’ Dancing Out The Madness 166' (Orijinal Dili:Enstrümantal) Review Mike Barnes's review: Earlier this year vocalist Nikolai Galen aka Nick Hobbs (ex-Mecca, The Shrubs) released the album Wild Flowers of Anatolia with the Turkish group Baba Zula under the name Eis Ten Polin. Although that recored was a freewheeling full band take on his idea of Anatolian blues, Hoca Nasreddin's wholly improvised A Headful of Birds is a different material entirely. The sessions were recorded over three days in Istanbul in May 2009 with saxophonist Robert Reigle - who Galen has played with in the improvising group Transsonance - and they were joined by Kevin Davis on cello and Destroyevski on guitar. The two CD's contain a total of 48 improvised tracks ranging from fragments of ideas under a minute long to more expansive pieces of nearly five minutes. Galen edited and montaged these discrete pieces int a meta composition of edits, and as the group's playing can be pithy and terse, some are just a thought or a texture before the next one arrives. In terms of Galen's own performance it's like the intimate inverse of his expansive exploration of styles on his solo CD Emmanuel Vigeland, which was recorded in a mausoleum. On initial listenings the first discs feels the slightly more cryptic of the two. On The Duke of Grey, Galen makes tremulous ululations against Reigle's long held sax notes: and on Shanty Town he is breathy, frail, like someone incanting their last prayer, but with control of the whistling upper register. The second disc derives from the same sessions but feels vocabulary more developed and song-like in places. Vortex recalls Jaap Blonk, with an animated Galen sounding like someone who is trying to communicate while inadvertently chewing up the language itself in the process. On Slave Drivers, his ruminative moaning and single volume pedal-controlled guitar notes over cello drones form a sombre colloquy. On Son Durak, Galen's overtone singing basically duets with Davis's cello, while he's almost entirely absent from the swelling cello lines and occasional astringent guitar chords of the closing She Parts The Clouds. It's rare to hear an improvising group who listen this closely and only react when they feel it necessary. --The Wire 394

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