Robbie Lee Lee & Halvorson: Seed Triangular

Seed Triangular is the first collaborative album from adventurous multi-instrumentalist Robbie Lee and virtuosic guitarist Mary Halvorson. The album features Halvorson and Lee not only improvising together on a rarely-heard combination of instruments for the very first time, but also documents Halvorson touching these instruments for the very first time. She explores the extended high and low strings of an 18-string Knutsen harp guitar (circa 1899), the vintage quirks of a 1930 Gibson L-2 guitar, and the gut strings of an 1888 SS Stewart 6-string banjo as Lee performs on equally unusual woodwinds, such as baroque flute and the world's smallest saxophone. The project began as a casual jam session between old friends one day in Brooklyn. Although Lee and Halvorson have not often appeared side-by-side professionally, they have improvised together for more than a decade, creating a mutually-understood musical language that draws on their respective musical backgrounds -- Halvorson as a prolific solo artist and bandleader, Lee as an in-demand studio and live musician who has played with artists ranging from Jozef van Wissem and Neil Hagerty to Cass McCombs and Glasser. Seed Triangular defies genre, floating in a space between early music, folk, free jazz and more. The pieces on the album are edited versions of the improvisation session, "composed" in a way that tells the story of the duo's discovery. The music is naturalist and responsive, with each performer continually taking turns generating or responding to each other as they explore the instruments, creating a magnetic pull with their catch and response as Halvorson learns about the instruments as she plays them. Despite the unusual and unfamiliar instrumentation, the duo's rich history performing with each other creates a baseline of ease that allows their signature styles to shine through, giving new life and textures to age-old sounds.