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Astrid Sonne: Great Doubt review – experimental viola player’s elliptical R&B
Some of her trademark instrumentals remain, but this new, interesting kind of R&B makes for exciting listening
Say You Love Me is a woozy piece of dub pitched somewhere between Robert Wyatt and King Tubby; Boost mixes doomy drones over some comically huge hip-hop beats; Everything Is Unreal sets a Laurie Anderson-style narration against minimalist backing. Best of all is Do You Wanna (Have a Baby), where Sonne asks herself (and humanity) the biggest of all questions over monstrous, decisive, thumpy drums, all wonderfully undercut by hymnal piano and horror movie strings. As well as a rumbling, waltz-time reworking of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed, there are hard-grooving pieces, heavy-duty avant garde freakouts and ruminative meditations (It Goes, Prelude Orison, the title track) that are closer to fin de siècle romanticism than jazz.
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