I have a theory that how I approach reviewing this CD is important (important as defined by a popular culture parameter, not anything of world-shaking importance), and perhaps of some interest to the reader. Usually I try to spare the reader a lot of meta-oriented garbage: he or she doesn’t care how or why I wrote the review, they just want to know what the music sounds like. Fair enough. But I’m stuck here. I probably know more about experimental music than your average Jane Reader, but not a lot more. I have a small and limited frame of reference which includes pioneers like John Cage, free jazzers such as Lol Coxhill, touching-upon-rock experimenters like Elliott Sharp and Glen Branca, and more recent popularizers like Godspeed You Black Emperor. Really, that’s not a lot to go on, and it’s hard to avoid sounding like a moron.

My having a hard time not sounding like a moron isn’t necessarily interesting to the average reader, except that it’s similar to the problems most people have when approaching experimental music. Rock and pop positively surround us. If you’re under 50, chances are they’re your first language, musically speaking. Hip hop and country are nearly as ubiquitous and depending on your age, race and geographic location, it’s a good bet that at least one of them seems comfortable and comprehensible. Jazz and classical are a little more difficult to mediate, but not by much. Experimental music, however, seems for many people to be a room without a door. You know you want to get in there, but how?

Similarly, I know I want to say something about Tricotage, but what? To start with the players: Joëlle Léandre is a well-known French double bassist. She studied and collaborated with John Cage and Merce Cunnigham, among others. Danielle P. Roger is a Montreal-based percussionist. Like Léandre, much of her work is based in improvisation, and Tricotage is no exception.

One gets the sense that Léandre and Roger approached the recording of this album with a goal of taking two traditionally solid instruments (as the liner notes say, “two behemoths heavy and loud”) and utilizing them to create light, even delicate music. Léandre manipulates her bass in endlessly fascinating ways: squeaking the strings, pizzicato, and unusual bowing techniques are all employed. Similarly, Roger’s drums create washes of sound rather than traditional percussive noises. This is really what makes Tricotage experimental: it's not that the sounds contained in it are unusual (though they are), but that the creators are pushing the envelope of what their instruments can do, and are consciously playing with the notion of what they produce as compared to what they are expecting to produce. When, at the beginning of “Au Clair de Lune,” Léandre’s bass is bowed traditionally, it’s a lovely sound. It’s made all the more lovely because, in the previous minutes of the preceding “Jeux de Main,” Léandre’s bass makes every noise imaginable -- except those you would expect.

Tricotage probably isn’t the best introduction to experimental music. It’s a nice addition, certainly. I myself have made a pledge to re-read Calvin Tomkins’ excellent essay on John Cage from The Bride and the Bachelors and then to actually sit down and listen to some of those famous “classic” pieces by Cage and others. After I finish my homework, I’m eager to return to Tricotage and see what else I hear.