REVIEWS

Cyclic Defrost
https://www.cyclicdefrost.com

It’s improvised music, where spacialisation is as an important compositional tool as instrument selection. Sounds ring out and reverberate from across the stereo field. Crescendos build with earth shattering significance, enveloping the piece before dispersing providing space before the next incursion forward. It’s curious, despite the diversity of timbres and periodic flurries, given its stop start nature there’s never really much feeling of momentum. The question remains, where are we? And where are we going? The answer is of course why focus on such insignificant questions? Shut up and embrace the moment.

Andrew Choate, 2012

"Spill is the Berlin-based duo of Magda Mayas on piano and Tony Buck on drums, and Stockholm Syndrome features two long tracks recorded in concert in Helsinki and Oslo in 2010. While we've all heard pianos played percussively, it's much rarer to hear someone play the drums with as much attention to melody as Buck. High-pitched bowed cymbals form harmonic sequences with brushed straw, wood on wood popping and bass thump drags. This duo isn't the kind where one person challenges and relents and waits for their partner to do the same. The friction they generate is instead the result of being so continuously and seamlessly intertwined that conflagrations of star-burning intensity naturally appear at every other twist. Mayas has a spectacularly gifted ear for timing, and translates it into her hands on the keys, giving Buck the freedom to create more and more unusual combinations of melody and rhythm. This duo is one of those rare groups where not only is the instrumentation perfectly matched, but the style with which the musicians approach their instruments is so personal that it's astonishing how well it all comes together."

Realtime Magazine
realtimearts.net

The next night’s highlight was the duet by Tony Buck (percussion) and Magda Mayas (prepared piano). Harmonics seeped from all that they struck, scraped and wrung out producing a luscious ebb and flow of complex layers. Lost in the evocations of this piece, I imagined at one point that I was hearing the everyday sounds of a small town, notated and reproduced in musical form. Eyes closed, I lost track of instrument identity sometimes and had to look back at the stage to understand exactly what was creating these sounds so full of cadence, resonance and melody.

The Wire, April 2009
Reviewed by Brian Morton
thewire.co.uk

(Magda Mayas & Tony Buck / Gold): There’s just 36 minutes of music here, but every second of it is interesting. Pianist Mayas plays chunky, bell-like clusters that seem to observe a slowly evolving musical logic, neither obviously melodic nor conventionally harmonic. Drummer Buck for the most part works a parallel path, working busily but delicately round his kit. The opening minutes of “mercury machine” are full of light, skittering figures on the metal parts and big, damped clusters on the piano, some of them hand-damped inside the sound box, I suspect. It opens out thereafter, but there’s no attempt here to emulate the iconic piano and drum duos of the past – Coltrane and Ali, Taylor and Roach. Mayas and Buck create their own intimate languages and in the process deliver something very special and exactly the right length.

freejazzblog.org
Spill - Stereo (Corvo Records, 2018) ****½
https://www.freejazzblog.org

What is the link between jazz and cats? Is it the animal's free spirit, its independence and unpredictability? Is it to do with its sense of precision and purpose? In any case, the cat staring from the cover of this album looks exactly like my cat when I was a kid.
Luckily that has no influence on my appreciation of this music, a duet between pianist Magda Mayas and drummer Tony Buck, both based in Berlin and performing as a duo since 2003. This is their third recording - next to a trio with Damon Smith on bass - and it contains two 20' minute tracks, designed for a vinyl production, called "Magnetic Island" and "Sway".
The two musicians create sound environments with pre-recorded elements from live performances with multi-speaker and multi-layered audio, on which they act and react. The music expands slowly and with precision. Despite the various layers, the texture is light and fragile. Every sound counts and has a value of its own in a larger space that still resonates with the traces of previous sounds. The calmness betrays an inherent intensity of contrast and anticipation. The variety of techniques they use to approach their instruments may be resulting in noise according to some, but in fact it's the exact opposite. It is sensual, elegant and refined. Once you immerse yourself in this beautiful and carefully crafted sonic universe, everything else will sound like vulgar noise afterwards.
We can only hope that the duo will release with a higher frequency in the future.
... and yes, they are free-spirited, independent minds with a high dose of unpredictability, as well as a sense of precision and purpose. Like cats. But you already expected this, of course.

Konfrontationen, 2007
Andrew Choate
facsimilemagazine.com

„....Improvised duos have lots of pitfalls to avoid: levels of alertness and/or talent can be too disparate, the speed of interaction may never sync, one person can try too hard to push the music in a certain direction, etc. But from the very first sounds they made and all the way to the final tones of the encore, these two were in perfect balance throughout. Tightly intertwined at the level of both the sonic material they pursued and the rhythmic pointillism with which they went about their journey, they stunned me into wide-eyed, open-mouthed attention. Even their minuscule pauses overlapped. And when they didn’t, it was as if they were just making room to highlight and frame what the other was doing. Pianos are naturally percussive instruments, and especially so when attacked from the inside, and this piano/drum duo exploited that overlap of sonority with exquisite concentration. Buck and Mayas were completely wrapped up inside each other’s sonics. There was no mimicry from one sound to the next, but everything they did was complementary. The spectrum of sounds used wasn’t especially large, but the context within which they played the sounds made the narrative difference between delicate and violent absolutely apparent and meaningful. A taut, highly successful combo.“

(Dis)perse
auricular.com

RELEASES

Mycelium
(LP, Album)
Corvo Records
2022

Stereo
(LP, Album)
Corvo Records
2018

Spill Plus (with Damon Smith)
(CD, Album )
Nuscope
2014

Plume (with John Butcher)
(CD, Album)
UnSounds
2013

Fluoresce
(CD, Album)
Monotype Records
2012

Stockholm Syndrome
(CD, Album, Ltd)
Al Maslakh
2012

Gold
(CD)
Creative Sources
2009

LINKS

Monotype Records
Magda Mayas
Al Maslakh records
Creative Sources
UnSounds records
Nuscope