Live Unison and Unison Continued

Kieran Daly is an American composer and guitarist with concentration in experimental monophonic music. His prolific recorded output can be found on Hibari, Marginal Frequency, Party Perfect, Tokinogake, Infant Tree, and Madacy Jazz, his central digital & print imprint co-operated with Sam Sfirri since 2014.

Sam Weinberg is a saxophonist, composer, and improviser from New York City. He has released three records for trio since 2023: two with his long-standing group with Henry Fraser and Jason Nazary (Plays Quarter Notes and Other Notes, and Of Peeling Passage: Live at Sisters), and Implicatures (with Chris Lightcap and Tom Rainey, released by Astral Spirits.)

Unison functions as a first principle for the organization of improvisational behavior, allowing for complex overlapping pattern morphologies to result from this simple textural principle. "Play together in unison but without knowing what each other will play" might be the pithy version of describing this practice to the uninitiated. The improvisational texture is further determined through prior mutual agreement on pitch range, register, and basic rhythmic subdivisions (quarter, half, eighth), though conflicts about their possibly-shifting definitions of intonation, pulse, transposition, etc. may emerge throughout performance. Thus, a strange game of follow the leader; the leader is unexpectedly supplanted at any moment and sometimes neutralized by an eerily coincidental tessellation. The music facilitates coincidence by way of the rigorously awry. It's almost as if Paula and Bridgette Powers played microtonal scales together on clarinet and guitar for forty minutes.