Alan Wilkinson, John Edwards, Steve Noble

The live music experience is what it’s all about! Let’s face it, the recording, the thing (CD, vinyl, ipod), that you’re listening to now is a luxury – a convenient form of storing and a flawed attempt at revisiting the ecstasy of the live experience. Live music is at the heart of civilization and culture. Live music is real music – the recording is simply the run out groove of time, a means to try and capture the experience. This trio is defined by live performance. The relationship between the three, fused into an innate musical understanding through constant exposure to one another in the fiery amphitheatre of improvisation, driven by their individuality, bursts into fissive conflagration in live performance. Resourcefully, remorselessly, inventive; muscular and graceful as the needs be – as the moment requires – they are live, alive, life. You can’t experience this trio in all their live magnificence on this wonderful recording, made at the Café Oto in London’s Dalston last July. (You could, if you manage to catch a gig of theirs – and this we’d thoroughly recommend; but not everyone can and not everyone will and this is still a vast world ). What you do have is a document, authentification if you like, of the Obliquity Trio Live. This is what it’s like; all you have to do is close your eyes, spin the volume dial clockwise, conjure up Café Oto in your mind’s eye and revisit the ecstasy of the live experience.