Crossing the Floor

CD - Creative Sources Recordings – CS876, Lisbon 2025

1. Visions - 15'36''
2. Solitude - 08'36''

3. Landscape - 09'13''

4. Triptych - 10'05''

5. Blood - 11'48''

Ernesto Rodrigues - Viola 

Jung-Jae Kim - Tenor Saxophone

Guilherme Rodrigues - Cello

Eric Bauer - Electronics

Stephen Flinn - Percussion

Recorded October 2025, Berlin

Cover design Carlos Santos

https://ernestorodrigues.bandcamp.com/album/crossing-the-floor

Reviews

Following a return here already last month, Ernesto Rodrigues returns again (with Guilherme Rodrigues too) to reprise the quintet from 5 in the Afternoon (recorded in Berlin in March 2024), now with Crossing the Floor (recorded this past October, the day after Münster). The earlier double album was noted here in August in a review of trio album Quark (with Jung-Jae Kim & Stephen Flinn, also from this quintet), more as a seeming preliminary investigation, quiet & everyday sounds, not necessarily coming readily to attention. Post-Cage tapestries can actually require considerable thought & preparation, and so the reprise (more than a year later) does come off more transformatively, while still feeling relatively sparse — i.e. rarely with more than one performer foregrounded, yet somehow not seeming soloistic, largely due to the figural sense of non-development, but also a sort of tautness in moving on, including via held sounds & some wobbly highs.... (This sort of dynamic can recall La rambarde... from earlier this year, i.e. there with more sense of electronics, also wavering held tones....) A sense of spectrality is thus emphasized — including by the ghostly lighting of the cover image (naturalistic cover images being a recent feature for Rodrigues, e.g. both Cimetière des Bateaux & Points of Dichotomy presenting high-def, sunlit photos...). Senses of continuity through each track on Crossing the Floor also suggest some element of dance to me (via the title, but also in relation to Cage...), a kind of quiet shadow dance across an open space.... Of course, these sorts of post-Cage images & confrontations with silence have been a feature of Rodrigues' output for many years, e.g. surveyed here briefly (this past April) with Genius Loci, there retaining a piano-keyboard orientation (as so often with Cage too...), so less of the ephemerality of e.g. La rambarde... or indeed of Crossing the Floor.... This quintet (seemingly arising from the quintet from the enigmatic Letters to Milena from 2022, without Kim but introducing to this space Eric Bauer, whose contributions on electronics can still be difficult to individuate...) also suggests other crossings & relations — i.e. per the dense relational possibilities of a quintet in general, pace discussions here of Two & Shadowplay also just last month... — as e.g. the Rodrigueses recorded Points of Dichotomy the next day (also in Berlin) with Kim & Andreas Willers (the guitarist having released Müller / Willers on Trouble in the East Records earlier this year, both albums featuring smoother textures, very different from rock guitar...), after having already recorded their second album as a duo (Pico, a second track using a field recording from the island...) a few days earlier. Although Crossing the Floor can then suggest senses of the outdoors (including windswept landscape...), and suggests very broad themes via track titles..., there's again something of an "everyday" & so domestic (mostly indoors...) orientation, indeed a sort of haunting (i.e. feelings of presence... versus e.g. the quite impersonal Distilling Silence from 2022...). There's sometimes a sort of desolation, absent e.g. zoomimesis (or at times any sense of humanity), almost into a sterile sense of space... but somehow still suggesting presence(s), maybe memories. Maybe it's an afterlife. It's then the waves of sound, the mysterious assemblages (presumably at least in part via electronics...), the senses of rising & falling, that end up prompting a tangible impression of sculpting time. This "ghost dance" will then also fade into the background of many noisier environments.... Todd McComb's Jazz Thoughts

Emerging from Ernesto Rodrigues' post-Cage investigations, this quintet with Jung-Jae Kim, Guilherme Rodrigues, Eric Bauer, and Stephen Flinn shapes sparse, deeply relational music where strings, winds, electronics, and percussion hover in spectral balance, forming a quiet "ghost dance" of held tones and subtle motion that blurs interior and exterior spaces while sculpting time through restraint and resonance. (Squidco)

Musique exploratoire tremblante, soutenue, inspiration spectrale, les sonorités extrêmes et fantomatiques s’agrégeant successivement en abandonnant une ou deux ressources sonores intangibles et en additionnant d’autres créent un lent mouvement vers un lent crescendo que le temps ne mesure pas même lorsque le silence affleure comme dans Landscape. La qualité des musiciens débouche sur le renouvellement de cette formule minimaliste dans une dynamique et une approche différente d’un morceau à l’autre, en sollicitant frottements discrets, scintillements métalliques, murmures de la colonne d’air implosée, ostinatos mécaniques sur les cordes, flottement de drones impalpables. Soigneusement, chacun instille à tour de rôle une nouvelle technique de jeu , un timbre particulier, un écho parasite dans le pot commun le plus discrètement du monde pour transformer le caractère de chacune des cinq pièces … compositions instantanées, improvisations ? Réductionnisme ou minimalisme horizontal. Cette musique flotte dans l’espace évolue comme un fil tendu par-dessus un abîme ou dans un ciel brumeux. Parfois, une voix souffle, du métal est titillé, un grondement lointain s’élève puis s’éteint et des vibrations s’ajoutent, un léger battement oscille, des lèvres sussurent dans le bec du sax, un gong tremble …. Une musique indéfinissable, un moment qui s’éternise en se métamorphosant en gaz, liquide, poussière, vent, nature respirant dans l’ombre ou au soleil. Un peu d’anarchie sur la caisse du violoncelle fait naître des frottements presque silencieux au moment où le silence survient un instant entre chaque séquence de Blood revisitée par une variation des bruissements. À l’intention recherchée, s’ajoute une dimension aléatoire, recherche de l’inconnu ou du mystère. Ernesto et Guilherme Rodrigues ont eu un rôle crucial dans l'établissement et le développement de cette musique lower case "réductionniste" il y a 25 ans déjà, au travers de leurs nombreux concert et leus inombrables enregistrements pour leur label Creative Sources. Même s'ils excellent à se confronter à d'autres "types d'improvisations, ils ont un art consommé à prolonger valablement cette démarche avec d'excellents artistes comme le percussionniste Stephen Flinn ou ce saxophoniste apparu récemment, Jung-Jae Kim et l'électronicien Eric Bauer sur une même longuer d'onde. À écouter en concert pour mesurer et goûter leur musique qui semble immobile mais toujours en mouvement ... lent ! Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg (Orynx)