Various Artists

Featuring: Iva Bittová, Marilyn Crispell, Benedicte Maurseth, David Rothenberg

Dispensing with ceremony, Four Fold opens as a quiet pact among four singular artists: Iva Bittová, Marilyn Crispell, Benedicte Maurseth, and David Rothenberg. The music unfolds as a room-sized geometry of breath, bow, and resonance—voice and violin tracing glottal arabesques, piano offering percussive glints and sudden sanctuaries, hardanger fiddle loosening overtones like weather, clarinet and bass clarinet blurring edges until boundaries feel optional. What emerges isn’t fusion so much as a commons, where each gesture is provisional, transparent, and necessary.

Across these pieces, the quartet privileges listening as technique. Phrases arrive unfinished, are finished elsewhere, then remembered differently; a motif might appear as a shadow before declaring itself in full light. Silence is not an intermission but a hinge, turning the ensemble toward fresh alignments: Marilyn Crispell letting a chord decay until its dust becomes tempo, Benedicte Maurseth feathering sympathetic strings into a halo that re-voices everything around it, David Rothenberg sliding through multiphonics that fold melody into breath, and Iva Bittová shaping vowels into grain, syllables into rhythm. The language is patient but never tentative, poised but never brittle.

Issued on CD, Four Fold favors tactility—liner notes as marginalia to the music’s evolving grammar, recordings that retain the grain of the room, the human drift of time. It reads as a field diary from a shared expedition: location changes, light changes, and with it the sense of what a song can hold. No grand thesis is advanced; instead, the quartet trusts the ear to gather what matters—contour, color, a chorus of aftertones. In the end, the record’s argument is simple and durable: four lines, drawn separately, can become one figure without erasing their differences.