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Watching and Listening

by Rob Brown & Daniel Levin

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  • Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Original art by Rob Brown, designed by musician and artist, WC Anderson

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Picidae 13:16
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Mocking Jack 04:43

about

On Watching and Listening, longtime collaborators Daniel Levin (cello) and Rob Brown (saxophone) purposely chose to take new sonic paths. When recording the album, which is their third as a duo, they swerved around tried-and-true methods of improvisation—in Levin’s liner notes for the album, he describes the process as akin to “a nail that I want to drive into wood, but instead of reaching for the hammer, I grab a pair of pliers, or perhaps some steel wool, and then use those alternative tools on the nail, and see what happens.” Making Watching and Listening was about exploring the new possibilities that became available when they opened themselves up to using new tools.

Levin and Brown’s flexibility to traverse these unknown territories comes from the deep trust they’ve built with each other. In their years playing together, they’ve watched each other evolve as musicians and learned how to attentively listen to each other. The new routes they’ve taken on Watching and Listening stemmed from that trust: In making music together, the two don’t need to know what’s going to happen. They don’t need a theme or a concept. They trust their intentions, and that’s all they need to make music.

Watching and Listening also stemmed from a new musical interest of Levin’s. Over the past few years, he started to explore what it means to think of notes as something other than notes, eschewing the notion that pitches should be the primary force of the music. Instead, he wanted to explore what it meant to make music that’s gestural, that progressively moves in the random directions he chose, without focusing on what pitches and tones come out. He and Brown hadn’t improvised using this language before Watching and Listening, but it proved to be a fruitful new exchange for them.

Watching and Listening is a summation of an approximately three hour improvisation session at Park West Studios in Brooklyn, New York. As Levin and Brown made music together that day, they were untethered to a theme. But upon listening back to dream up titles for each track, Brown began to imagine birds. So, each title—and the album’s artwork, which features wire bird sculptures that Brown made by hand—originates from that natural inspiration. It’s a peaceful resting point, a respite from the stress of the past year in quarantine.

credits

released June 10, 2021

Rob Brown - alto saxophone, covert art
Daniel Levin - cello
Jim Clouse - recording, mixing, mastering
Chad Anderson - graphic design

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all rights reserved

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Mahakala Music Hot Springs, Arkansas

We publish aggressively beautiful music, connecting geographically and culturally disparate musicians.

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