Jazz
True Sound Recordings · 1 October 2026
Four tracks and forty-five and a half minutes, the shortest at 9:40 and the title piece at 13:16. “Galaxies Twist Under Before It” (10:53) opens with Ken Filiano’s double bass staking out ground and Jason Kao Hwang’s violin above it, and the ten minutes that follow are a game of densities: the trio thickens until it sounds aggressive and then empties out until the violin is left almost alone for whole bars at a time. “Ricochet” (11:47) closes with the hardest music on the record, Andrew Drury breaking the pulse every time the piece looks like settling.
Drury’s instrument list has to be read in full: drum set, gongs, aluminium pots, stainless steel bowls, a Tibetan prayer bowl, bells, seed pods, oyster and mussel shells, wood block, cowbell, a bronze gear and the cover plate off a sink tap. Those objects make the colour of “What to Keep, What to Let Go” (9:40), where the metal comes and goes and sometimes turns the direction of the whole piece. Hwang, though, wrote all four compositions, plays the violin and mixed the record himself, with Filiano credited as mix consultant. This music depends on three players reacting as equals, and giving one of the three the last word on where each of them sits in the stereo image is not a technical detail. You can hear it in the result: the violin is always comfortably in front, including in the passages where Drury is doing the most interesting work.
Filiano alternates pizzicato and bow, and the trio comes from a first record on the same label released in 2020. This one was recorded at Tedesco Studios on 18 and 19 March 2024 and did not appear until 1 October 2026, two and a half years later, with neither the label nor the musicians explaining why.
Rating: 8.2/10
Text by Aina Torrents