Multi-instrumentalist Paul Dunmall's dauntingly large catalog is nothing if not diverse, and he's always coming up with fascinating instrumental combinations, certainly the case with this two-tenor saxophone and two-guitar quartet. As with many other Dunmall releases, constant change is the order of the day as the group creates a landscape of long lines dotted with craggy peaks of dissonance and dynamic intrigue.
The album begins with pointilisms similar to those on the contemporaneous Dreamworld, using the same sorts of stereo placement so that differentiation of instruments is easy. Lucky for the listener that such precautions were taken, as soon, conventional melodies become subservient to timbre. Vast swatches of sound, saxophone rasps, gurgles, airy wisps and neo-Star Wars guitar gunfire merge to create a texture that is at once diverse and surprisingly unified as each musician enters the others' soundworlds. Most of "4 Souls, 8 Eyes" can be heard either as a series of rapid fire changes or as a sweeping progression from transparency to opacity and back again, depending on listener focus, paving the way for the blistering guitar jam constituting the title track.
To say that the music on offer is made strictly by saxophone and guitar is to sell it short. Listen, to cite only one example, to the airy percussives that open the beautifully static "Bhutan," an almost intimidating construction of loops and fearless fretwork whose forward and reversed simultaneities eschew straight-forward temporal perception. The level of interaction throughout the disc is astonishing as all four players listen, interact and lead in perfect balance. Most of the music renders the term "quartet" inaccurate; we're really hearing a small orchestra, so vast is each player's arsenal of sounds, but they know how to use them with delicacy. The recording is as good as the playing is on yet another excellent FMR release.
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