Things we like: Lisa Cameron, Sleeping Beast

Lisa Cameron is one of my favorite musicians on Earth, one whose work exemplifies electroacoustic improvisation at its finest. With a style steeped in psychedelic rock (she kicks traps with venerable Austin space rockers ST-37) as well as free jazz and Euro free improv, she's the leading practitioner of drum feedback extant.

Like her frequent collaborator, prepared guitar specialist Sandy Ewen, Cameron has a highly tactile approach to sound sculpture. At a recent appearance at Fort Worth's Grackle Art Gallery in duo with violinist Alex Cunningham, she demonstrated a propensity for sympathetic listening and responding that only the finest improvisers possess. Her tools include contact mics on drum heads, singing bowls, cymbals, a mixer, and an array of beaters and small objects. Observing at close range, one could only be amazed at the way she was able to electronically transmute the confluence of sound waves from Cunningham's bow and strings and vibrating objects on her drum heads into a veritable aural tsunami. The ease with which she and the violinist were able to follow each other's dynamic shifts entered the realm of the magical.

Cameron's part of a cohort of musicians -- others include her fellow Austinites, guitarist Jonathan F. Horne, saxophonist Joshua Thomson, and Norwegian expat bassist Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten; North Texas siblings, bassist Aaron and drummer-vibraphonist Stefan Gonzalez; and Houston-based trombonist Dave Dove, trumpeter Jawwaad Taylor, and saxophonists Jason Jackson and Danny Kamins -- who connect Texas to the wider world of improvised music. Last year's Live at Love Wheel Records with Thomson and Haker-Flaten was a good vinyl representation of this tribe. Now Kamins' label Musical Eschatology has released Sleeping Beast, a 2023 recording of Kamins and Cameron in a trio with bassist Thomas Helton, and it's quite stupendous.

One of the shortcomings of a lot of improvised music one hears these days is a tendency toward bombast -- a more art-tastic take on the old rockaroll saw "When all else fails, kick over the amps." Texan improvisers benefit from the ongoing influence of pioneering Tejana experimentalist and Deep Listening founder Pauline Oliveros, whose eponymous foundation gave birth to Dove's Nameless Sound organization, in which musicians like Kamins, Ewen, and Horne cut their improvising teeth. While Sleeping Beast includes ample opportunity for Kamins to flaunt his circular breathing fluency and seemingly endless melodic invention over Helton and Cameron's turbulent sprung rhythm, much of the real action here takes place in the quietest passages. All three musicians are virtuosi, but it's in the confluence of their imaginations that true wizardry occurs. Get you some of this.