In the split second before words form and colours and shapes have a chance to cohere, when the briefest of glances suggests only a congealed paint palette of daubed greens, lurid and seasick, both offset and accentuated by flashes of neon red, I think that I know what I see when I’m looking at the cover for the new album Escape by Andy Moor and Marta Warelis: the windshield of a car viewed from the interior, with something aflame in the rearview while the window looks out onto a pallid highway, perhaps stormy or at the very least rainswept, not quite the witching hour but an inverted sort of gloaming. Bathed in the same light, the dashboard too reflects a shade of queasy bottle green.
A proper look reveals something else entirely: the flattened perspective of a green wall or ceiling above a skirting board or window frame and green curtains in what might be a diner. The rearview mirror is in fact a letter box or some other type of hatch emblazoned with the word ‘ESCAPE’, and the lines which writ small seemed to demarcate highway and horizon are instead electrical wires covered by everyday conductor cable.
Andy Moor and Marta Warelis portend a guitar and piano duo, but they shift shapes and sometimes blur into one another as they wreak extraordinary textures from their instruments. With a background which stretches all the way from anarcho-punk and free jazz to a kind of nascent freak folk and revivalist strains of klezmer and rebetiko, the guitarist Andy Moor might be best known for his stints with Dog Faced Hermans and The Ex but a series of duets with the likes of Alva Noto, Thurston Moore and Ken Vandermark have pushed him further in the vein of minimalist electronics and the improvisational avant-garde.
The pianist Marta Warelis is far newer to the scene, but her relationship with Frank Rosaly provides a connecting thread: she formed a trio with the drummer plus the saxophonist and clarinetist Tobias Klein back in 2020, while Moor and Rosaly partnered up with the baritone saxophonist Giuseppe Doronzo for a debut performance at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam in the summer of 2022, released as Futuro Ancestrale on Clean Feed earlier this year while tendresse by Klein, Rosaly and Warelis is due out at the end of this month on Relative Pitch Records. The Norwegian axis of Ingebrigt HĆ„ker Flaten and Paal Nilssen-Love also count among Warelis and Moor’s collaborators.
Jangling and lurching, spitballing and scrotumtightening, their first album as a duo is a collection of improvisations captured at the Amsterdam alternative bastion Zaal 100. After spare piano keys and spidery guitar lines emerge from behind the warbled chimes of several clocks, Escape really gets its engines revving with the second track ‘Highway Trajectory’, where Moor’s motorised strums advance over a wiry scatter of ramshackle percussion comprised of the teased and torqued strings of a splintering piano, like a dangling air freshener in a car that suddenly careens down a hillside or an Alexander Calder mobile wrapped tight and then sent for a spin.
On ‘Maintenance Cabbage’ the engine is throttled beneath more twinkling keys, before Warelis and Moor get to work with an habitually disordered toolset of screwdrivers and wrenches, flanges, pistons and pumps heedless as to whether there’s carbon on the valves or some other ailment, hacking away to remedy whatever problem might sprout up next, while the lengthy ‘Imbue’ is more ruminative and circumspect. Seguing readily between foreground and background, Warelis uses the sustain pedal to create thick envelopes of tension and reaches inside of her instrument to conduct all manner of string piano treatments, while through the flubbed and warped plucking of his strings Moor erects a crumbling drywall of scuzzy feedback.
From the short squibs of ‘Commitment Keys’, the track ‘Incunabula’ (which refers to the earliest phase of printed material in Europe) shreds through what sounds like the distressed bowing of a cello, whose sawed strings are accompanied by the more resonant swells of Moor’s guitar, which rumble and rise like the steep bends of a canyon. And finally on the album-closer ‘Apocalyptic TV’, deft and skittish piano arpeggios are offset by stormy spurts of guitar, readying the exhaust for a rapid takeoff or ominously closing down the distance. The piece begins to play like a cinematic chase between someone of diminutive stature but fleet of foot and someone of soaring height yet heavyset, a characterisation which by no means resembles the duo.
