Anton Mobin, Martina Verhoeven

“Thanks to Anton Mobin and his ‘prepared chamber’, a wooden box with strings, objects, and amplification. An instrument not unlike Tore H. Boe’s ‘acoustic laptop’. It is also an instrument for which we don’t know what it will sound like, unlike the piano, played by Martina Verhoeven, even when she plays the piano less traditionally; techniques that go back to John Cage and his prepared piano. Verhoeven divides her attention to both the keys and the inside of the piano. In the prepared chamber of Mobin, all sorts of sounds are possible. Strings plucked, bowed or thumbed, and maybe there is also a bit of vinyl that he hand spins. Combining these two instruments brings out some wonderful music all over the place. Improvisation is, of course, one thing, a fixed point for departure, but the two also show, at times, some form of repetition that see them repeatedly bang their instruments for a while. That might seem das verboten in the world of free improvisation, but it works well within their ‘anything goes’ approach. For minutes on end, there is a total abstraction going on, but Verhoeven returns to the keyboard and reminds us that this is the piano. Within those wide apart boundaries, this music happens. There are two pieces here, ‘Cure’ and ‘Mound’, of which the first is almost forty-seven minutes.  I thought that was more than enough, as in that time frame, they explored so many ideas that it seemed complicated to top that. And as such, ‘Mound’ seems a continuation of ideas for them, a further exploration of what we already know, and this indeed is one of the discs that is the best split in two different listening sessions. Each piece is great, that much is sure, but together is too big of a plate to eat at once.” - Vital Weekly