Plated up: service! The title Drums & Bells with the "comparing sticks" subtitle maps out the boundaries of today's playground. It's sixty-four minutes of solo or twinned percussive workouts. Save for experienced drummers, the rest of us outsiders will still wonder about certain timbres and what created them, track titles be damned. After all, what's a glass vase sound like in your imagination? Whilst the track titles are pointers, there's a lot more going on. With up to 50dB (!) of dynamic range, Tony's album which he recorded and mixed live is the antithesis of compressed sadness. Call it dynamically liberated joy, with stuff happening 60dB below the 0 surface. Decays can't help but go on forever. And with transient fidelity the currency in which percussion trades, here it trades at a premium. Naturally, just how much instantaneous finesse gets harvested depends on your system. How confused is its impulse response, how shifted its phase? Our discrete R2R converter, 1MHz amps with single Mosfets per phase and widebanders augmented by premium compression tweeters excel where speed is king and the steepest rise times resolve the most immediacy. Ditto HifiMan's Susvara headphone run off Bakoon's AMP-12R. What could be more immediate than immediate, you ask? Spin up Drums & Bells and find out.


Obviously there's no real melody here nor are there typical harmonies. Still, ever since Africa's pitch-shifting talking drums, many listeners have become comfortable with purely percussive exploits, be those by trance drummers from Ghana, djembe quartets from Anatolia or polyrhythmic fireworks from Indian maestros like Alla Rakha or Zakir Hussain. Where Dutz/Wabich go beyond is in the sheer breadth of their timbres as tickled with those deliberate stick changes. Eskimos and Saami are said to have twenty different words for snow. Here our ears are being trained that drum sticks and hittable objects come in far more shapes, sizes and colours than we suspected. Thankfully we're not expected to expand our verbal vocabulary accordingly. Otherwise we'd be hard pressed to describe it all and draw up twenty words each for rattling, jangling, buzzing and so forth. That'll be my excuse, too. Phew.