Bent Spoon Trio + Danny Meichel

It's a summertime midnight in Calgary, so what do you do? If you're a bunch of free improvisers, you find an unoccupied tunnel someplace and set up your stuff and start blowing. That's what the Bent Spoon Trio and buddy reed player Danny Meichel did, and the results are a CD's worth of compelling listening. One of the marks of good free improv is the changing density of sonic events, which forms a basic energy structure that makes things interesting for the other end of the musical equation: the listener. Chris Dadge (strings/percussion), David Laing (alto sax/etc.), Scott Munro (trombone/etc.) and Meichel are able to keep that density and their ideas flowing throughout. Simple repeated sound gestures give way to densely packed mosaics of sound shards, rattles and the always-returning Meichel bass clarinet motifs that give perceptible shape to the 40-minute, three-track recording. Track two has what sounds like an electronic slide whistle being played in a train station populated by a flock of geese. Loopy glissandi swoop, meet and depart while a saxophone repeats a pitch played by who knows what, then continues on with arpeggiated abandon. Never flagging, Lost in a Chinese Attic makes for interesting listening throughout.