On alene et, Michaela Turcerová, a Copenhagen-based, Slovakia born musician, takes minutiae — the tiniest scrapes and breathiest hums — and distorts them into sprawling, collaged webs that barely resemble the instrument in its natural state. Each shard, when pieced together, makes a rhythmic, undulating sound born from the subtlest motions.
Alene et marks Turcerová’s debut as a soloist, putting a spotlight on the exploratory approach she has developed on her own and across a variety of collaborations. She has long studied the quiet excavation of her instrument, pulling it apart to find a new vocabulary. To develop this language, she unearths shards of sound from the instrument, muting it or bringing out its scratchiness and grittiness. Primarily working with open-ended scores and improvisation, she is inspired by various percussive music, looking to deep sonic awareness to guide her. As a soloist, her music harkens to the abstracted electronics present across the Editions Mego catalog or the distorted ruminations of Nyege Nyege tapes. And no matter where she goes, she is constantly in the pursuit of the unknown — the hidden elements of music that come to life through experimentation and listening.
With alene et, Turcerová presents her singular language on the saxophone to the fullest. To make this music, she placed many microphones close to her instrument, zeroing in to each sound and examining it from multiple different angles. She emphasizes the percussive possibilities of her instrument, puzzle-piecing each note into pulsating webs. Each track highlights a different side of the saxophone — the bristling distortion and amplification of a column of air as it blows through her saxophone’s body, the trickling tapping of the keys as she places her fingers onto them.
At its core, alene et presents Turcerová’s curiosity. The saxophone lives many different lives within her hands, shapeshifting through the uncovering of its possibilities. She shows us how the instrument is an ever-changing entity, a distorted and blown out drone with a thousand shards poking out from inside of it. But more than just a showcase of an individual instrument, alene et feels like a statement of the act of exploration. Turcerová is an excavator, always looking for new worlds hidden within her saxophone, and leaving room for more to come alive with each listen.
