(Vital Weekly) Two heavyweights from the wide world of improvised music teaming up together. In the left corner, we find Guro Skumsnes Moe. We know her from her work on the double bass, octobass and electric bass (and vocalist) with such groups as MoE and Sult, collaborator with Lasse Marhaug, and productions for movie and dance performances. In the right corner is Philippe Petit, once working with turntables and occupied with modular electronics these days. His collaborators include Lydia Lunch, Murcof, Mark Cunningham, Cindytalj and many others. As much info as we have on their respective backgrounds, there isn't much about the actual record they recorded together. Moe is on octabass (that's the spelling on Bandcamp), electric bass and voice and Petit on EMS synthi A, turntables and voice. The recordings were made in June 2020. The first of the piece, '..', made me think we landed heavily in the world of improvised music, with a bare synth tone and some voice. But soon enough, the album takes on a much different course. The music snowballs into a heavy mass of sound of thick drones of both the synthesizer and the bass. Somewhere the voice (Moe's more than Petit, I think) returns and creates more weight on the music. Noisy, sure, but that seems not to be the goal of the music. It is something hard to escape. The other long piece is called '...', which I like better. The interaction is more together, more composition than improvisation, I thought. Probably they're not loops, but that's what the music sounds like in the first half. For some reason, this piece consists of two parts, of which the second is a bit more chaotic than the first half; a deliberate contrast, perhaps, but one that works quite well. The music here is not easily accessed by the listener and comes with a threshold of noise involved. Once you cross that level, the music is as beautiful and heavy as a black hole. The short in-between 'Interlude' may serve as a passage between these long movements but can also be ignored as a mere set of small sounds. - Frans de Waard

(Avant Music News) Guro Skumsnes Moe and Philippe Petit’s self-titled release features the French analogue synthesizer master with Norwegian Moe, who in addition to electric bass and vocals is represented here on the Octobass, a rare, enormous, three-string double bass that sounds in a rumblingly low register. The instrument is a strong presence on the release’s two long tracks—its strings vibrate at such a low frequency one can almost see them as they underscore the sonic kaleidoscope thrown out by Petit’s EMI synth and turntables. The third track, a two-minute interlude between the two longer pieces, offers an economical distillation of the duo’s collective sound. - Daniel Barbiero