Carlos Ferreira and Dasom Baek Make Beautiful Noise

While it sounds like it might be the work of some mysterious intergalactic orchestra, Unbalance is the work of two musicians performing with little to no advance direction. Brazilian experimental guitarist and composer Carlos Ferreira and Korean performer and composer Dasom Baek combined their adept skills in ambient/drone, avant-garde, musique concrète, and free improvisation to create an album of four pieces entirely through uninterrupted improvisational flow. The results are stunning.

In addition to the electric guitar, Ferreira uses live electronics, working with an open-source software program called ppooll, which enables audio signal processing, performance, and routing. Baek, meanwhile, performs on traditional Korean wind instruments – jungju, daegum, sogeum, and danso – alongside spoken word and extended vocalizations.

Ferreira and Baek set the scene ominously from the very start. “Ambivalence” opens with low-end groans, a breathy woodwind, futuristic synth blasts, and Baek’s urgent whispers. It’s the sound of elegant collapse. While there are only four tracks on Unbalance, they all hover somewhere between eight and 13 minutes, giving both artists – recording in their respective hometowns of Seoul, South Korea, and Porto Alegre, Brazil – plenty of time to explore, playing off each other and themselves. Around the halfway mark, the mechanical sounds of a sequencer offer a pulse, a semblance of life amid the noise. Ferreira and Baek work wonders together, and part of the magic is their ability to stay curious and imaginative.

“Resonant Instincts” puts Baek’s wind instruments at the forefront, with sustained, ominous instrumental beds providing a sort of consistency among the chaos. Here, we’re in more drone territory than outright noise, and it’s a nice contrast from the chaos of the first track. The same can be said for “Fragments of Silence”, which incorporates more hushed vocalizations and some sparse, inspired guitar leads from Ferreira. The sound remains dark and forbidding and would work beautifully as a dark film score, perhaps something John Carpenter might dream up.

“Dialog”, the closer and the longest track, begins with more sequencing and a new approach as the relative brightness of the repeated notes recalls Steve Reich or Laurie Spiegel, and the overwhelming synth chords provide an immersive sense of calm among the sea of noise. As the album progresses, it appears to become slightly more serene and orderly, but it’s still a big, beautifully overpowering blast of sonic maximalism.

It’s also a testament to the chemistry between these two massively creative and gifted musicians that they can start from zero with little to no prompting and produce something this magical and timeless. Carlos Ferreira and Dasom Baek’s Unbalance may not have rewritten the rules of free-form experimental improvisation, but it’s definitely the sound of the genre at its creative peak.