about the cassette

Chris Williams and Booker Stardrum are prominent figures in the free music communities they've been part of for years. Stardrum, a percussionist, and Williams, a trumpeter, both swirl in the eddies of the burgeoning fourth world free electronics jazz community.

On Relay, the duo hashes through an icy and diffused collection of jittery motifs, splotchy melodies, muffled notions, and passing drifts. They move between lyrically curious melodies and phrasings and extended technique textural foragings. Williams’ horn gurgles like a sloshed stomach in places, then, accompanied by looped cycles of Stardrum’s toothy sampling, melodic fragments, and distant bells, Williams suddenly soars sonorously.

The album is uneasy in the corners, yet these wound-up moments reveal a kind of harmonious transparency. Moments of stillness collapse into chasmal and meditative micro-percussion, bells and static, and timbral whispers. Williams’ trumpet skips like a stone over Stardrum’s frozen pond.

This album is Cached’s first foray into the cassette format to best retain the structure and composition, the two-sidedness, of this album. Two performances by this duo explore music written on space and swept across time, traversing every dimensional axis.