Thirsty Ear
2003
The Sublime And. Science Friction Live
About This Album
Tim Berne's latest band Science Friction is heard here for the first time in front of a live audience in Switzerland in April 2003. A complete concert spread out over two CDs, Sublime And offers a different view of Berne's ever-expansive compositional ideas and how those notions meld into a unit of top-notch improvisers: guitarist Marc Ducret, Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes and laptop, and drummer Tom Rainey. For starters, five of the six compositions featured here are over ten minutes. Two are over 20, and one is over 30, leaving fantastic amounts of room for group interplay and improvisation. Musically, two of these six selections and half of one are taken from the group's self-titled studio debut and turned into entirely different animals by the time they reach culmination. Berne's composing for this unit is inspired in part by Ornette Coleman's dictum of using repetitive melodies refracted against harmonic and rhythmic extrapolation that linguistically and dynamically commingles to create towering structures of tension, partial release, and a field map of tonal possibilities realized by the various unions achieved by the interplay of various instruments. In this band, Ducret's guitar is used as the foil and complement in Berne's melodic universe, which is architecturally rendered as almost triangular in scope, ever widening at the rhythmic bottom and tonal center of any given work; the interval is used as a near modal device.
Track List

Disc 1 (try track 1)

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Disc 2 (try track 1)

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