The first meeting on disc between two of the finest and most innovative electroacoustic instrumentalists in Germany: Argentine-born, Berlin-based Lucio Capece (soprano saxophone, bass clarinet, preparations, mini megaphone) and Hamburg-based Birgit Ulher (trumpet, mutes, radio, speaker). Recorded live on May 14th, 2010 at the Blurred Edges Festival in Hamburg, Choices documents three pieces that explore the expanded sonic possibilities of prepared wind instruments through extended techniques and electronic augmentation.
Capece, who trained as a classical guitarist and jazz saxophonist at the Ginastera Conservatory in Buenos Aires before relocating to Europe, has since the late 1990s focused on electroacoustic improvisation characterized by quietness, attentive listening, and granular material. He employs countless preparations – often objects inserted into his saxophone – to create entirely unexpected sound characteristics that can be remarkably percussive. Ulher, born in Nuremberg and based in Hamburg since 1982, has developed a distinguished grammar of extended trumpet techniques including splitting sounds, multiphonics, and granular textures. Her work with radio is particularly distinctive: the trumpet functions as an acoustic chamber that modulates radio noise, serving as both transmitter and receiver simultaneously. She has organized the Real Time Music Meeting festival in Hamburg for over a decade and collaborated with Tim Hodgkinson, Rhodri Davies, Gene Coleman, and many others.
The music on Choices operates across multiple sonic territories. There are explorations of amplified breath flowing through the instruments' conduits, percussive pulsations obtained through preparations that create rhythmical flapping comparable to metallic snare drums, and perhaps most compellingly, passages where actual pitches converge in pseudo-static configurations – gritty clusters and blistering drones that push toward levels of uncomfortable intensity, particularly in the final piece Orbital, deeply characterized by Ulher's radio work.
Guillaume Belhomme (Le Son du Grisli) observed that Choices demonstrates what even the participants themselves hadn't dared whisper: "Lucio Capece and Birgit Ulher are made to play together." He described the duo as "forming a duo of breaths and saliva in a wandering boat" that "elaborate trajectories as long as a thumb – therefore: trajectories multiplied in consequence." A German reviewer noted the pairing is "somewhat more austere and stricter" but equally rewarding, with "a cooing and gurgling everywhere, as if in a petting zoo."
