Actual Music Now, by Actual Music

Actual Music Now

by Actual Music

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1.	Fifteen Years 07:17	buy track
2.	Terrifying 03:15	buy track
3.	Directly 05:43	buy track
4.	Unafraid 05:50	buy track
5.	The Heart Sutra 06:34	buy track
6.	Gravitational 05:22	buy track
7.	Emptiness 07:30	buy track
8.	Vibrational 08:25	buy track
9.	Unified 07:13	buy track

about

Actual Music Now is the first recording in eighteen years by Dave Pavkovic and Tatsu Aoki. Their partnership is rooted in the myriad possibilities of a particular time and place, but there’s nothing rehashed about it. Between 1994 and 2004, they often worked together in Chicago’s jazz, post-rock, and theater scenes. The grave vibes, considered interplay, and elemental rhythms conjured here are spontaneous expressions of an encounter lived fully in the moment.

While both men are capable multi-instrumentalists, Aoki and Pavkovic confine themselves to drum kit and double bass throughout Actual Music Now. With these essential tools, they synthesize sui generis music from timbre, groove, and melody. As important as the instrumentation is their rapport, which allows them not only to complement each other’s moves, but to go their own way in the course of an improvisation, trusting the other to have their back. On “Fifteen Years,” you can hear each man advance an exploratory gambit, and then join in formation as spontaneously as two birds on a migratory journey. Aoki sets the beat and Pavkovic manipulates pure, metallic sound on “Directly.” And the aptly entitled “Emptiness” finds both musicians using sounds to give shape to rhythmically placed silences.

The uncannily deft and prescient improvisations here show the impact of Aoki's work with Art Ensemble of Chicago legends like Famoudou Don Moye and Roscoe Mitchell, while resourceful kit work from Pavkovic calls to mind limber mixers of thorn and swing like William Hooker and Hamid Drake. At no time is this duo characterized by a sense of incompleteness or skeletal sketching; it answers all questions with sound and space. Actual Music isn’t the work of some rhythm section showing its stuff; it’s a set of complete, cohesive statements that is as immediate as your next breath.

credits

released March 24, 2023

Tatsu Aoki: Bass
David Pavkovic: Drums

Recorded by Caleb Willitz at Midnight Tea Studio, Chicago IL, June 25, 2021
Mixed by David Pavkovic in Austin Texas, February 2022
Mastered by David Pavkovic, guiding the robot hand at Aria Mastering February 2022

All songs by Tatsu Aoki and David Pavkovic.

This is FPE #49, 2023.

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FPE Records Oak Park, Illinois

FPE Records is an eclectic independent label based in Oak Park, IL, USA

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