Reviews: (Vital Weekly) Lastly, on cassette is the trio Dustceawung (or, rather, dustsceawung). They are Miri Karraker (viola), Noah Ophoven-Baldwin (cornet) and Mitch Stahlmann (flute). They started in Minneapolis in 2017 with a shared interest in lowercase music, small sounds, and “questions around instrument proficiency”. They played a few concerts in 2017 and 2018 but drifted apart for various reasons and reconvened in 2022 via Zoom. If I understand this, they used Zoom to create music, play together, listen, adding sounds. On this cassette is a recording of that, found on the B side, while on the A side, there is a recording from 2018. Their love for small sounds is evident, as they keep their volume down and their sounds small. One only sometimes recognises the instruments played by scraping, rubbing, touching and so forth their instruments. In their 2018 piece, they like to keep things together, and small plus small equals something not very big. There is, perhaps, only sometimes a lot of ‘definition’ in their playing, but I assume that’s how they like these things. On their 2022 recording, there is a bit more on the definition side, but at the same time, the fondness to keep things small and very much together is still strong. As such, both sides have little difference, even when the 2018 recording starts with something that uses electronics, which didn’t seem part of the 2022 recording. I slightly preferred the 2018 recording, mainly because of the apparent presence of electronics, expanding their music a bit beyond the sometimes too-intimate part. - Frans de Waard
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