This album immediately put me in a meditative mood and kept me there the whole time. Interestingly, the Violin Sonata (BWV 1001) by JS Bach is played as if Carrettin had been influenced by the work of guitarist/composer Brian Eno or perhaps Robert Fripp’s atmospheric work. Somehow Bach deviates from traditional notions of time, pulse and phrasing. It is as if Carrettin had deconstructed the rhythm and dance and “repainted” the picture to show a Jungian wandering in a liminal space, conscious yet in a dream.

The fugue, often played raw, forceful and powerful (in other recordings), in Carrettin’s hands explores arpeggios played with the bow, yet sometimes sounding like a lute player plucking each string ever so gently. In this fugue, Carrettin finds some particularly expressive chord voicings that Bach wrote, but the timing of the sustained double or triple notes seems to intentionally reveal a hue we haven’t heard in the many, many recordings of this piece on the acoustic violin. Carrettin’s decision to use an electric violin (by Yamaha) with a period Baroque bow is also intriguing. The bow seems to draw out the “historically informed” nuances along with the reverberation that sounds like he’s playing in a European chapel. In fact, the recording was made in a chapel owned by the Sono Luminus record label in Virginia, USA. The tone of the electric violin is sweet, velvety and textured. It seems to be somewhere between an old world sound and a contemporary sound and sometimes makes me think of the sound qualities of a movie theater. When I listened to the album for the second time, again with headphones, I turned the volume up quite high and could hear Carrettin’s breathing. I really appreciate that the sound engineer gives us the actual sound in the room by putting a microphone in the room rather than recording directly through cables. The result is that the listener is in the room and hears the performance.

Mina Gajic’s contributions take advantage of the otherworldly qualities of the prepared piano and use John Cage’s specifications by placing nuts, bolts, wedges, rubber, wood and metal between the piano strings, completely transforming the instrument. The combination of the piano preparation and the nine-foot Steinway concert grand piano used, the work of the technician and the recording engineer’s capture of the sound world make this perhaps the most accomplished recording of a prepared piano and of Cage’s works for this instrument that I have ever heard. Mina Gajic seems to know this particular instrument very well and I suspect she has spent a lot of time with the prepared instrument. Her tactile approach brings out layers upon layers of overtones, sometimes transporting the listener to a transcendental state, inspired by the resonances and Mina Gajic’s keen sense of time. Her approach to Cage’s works is quite playful at times and when I closed my eyes I often saw images of dancers in my head. And then the gong sounded, over and over again, and I found myself in an Eastern temple, smelling the incense and seeing Japanese maple trees out of the corner of my eye. Somehow Mina Gajic’s sense of character and resonance, as well as the duo’s chosen order of pieces/movements, create a complementary relationship between the German Bach of the 1720s and the American Cage of the 1940s. This is a rare and unorthodox pairing of composers, and yet in this recording it all makes perfect sense. What I like most about Bach UnCaged is the feeling I had afterward, as if I had been dreaming for nearly an hour, leisurely wandering the farthest reaches of my consciousness, and finally returned refreshed and inspired.

You can listen to the album on Spotify.