Gabriel Zucker & Attila Gyárfás - Cadences (2024)

When the duo met up in February 2023 for a planned two-week tour from Budapest to Izmir, Zucker brought material for a second record, built on fragments written in the New Mexican desert during the pandemic, a theme from a stint in Mexico City in 2022, and stitched together in the wake of turbulent life changes around the new year. Rather than forming a single, closed narrative arc, the composition is written in two halves, each half containing a different version of the same five pieces. The appearance, most of the way through the second half, of Turbulence II — a peaceful reflection of the aggressive Turbulence I that opens the composition — suggests an arch form, a final mirrored closing of the opening. But instead the second half closes like the first, with Cadences II, a notably non-cadential composition that suggests rather the lack of conclusions — as if the music might just rotate endlessly into the future.

Gyárfás and Zucker developed the new music in February on a tour interrupted by the earthquake in Turkiye, before audiences in Budapest, Szeged, Belgrade, Sofia, Plovdiv, and Istanbul, rehearsed at sound checks and on trains and buses. The music was recorded finally in August 2023, both halves in single epic live takes, in a single-day recording session in Budapest.

Gabriel Zucker, piano, synthesizer, voice
Attila Gyárfás, drum set, gong synthesizer

Tracklist
01. Part 1- then
02. Part 2- now