June 2007

Susanna Lindeborg's Mwendo Dawa
Live at Fasching
LJ Records

By Forrest Dylan Bryant

In this live recording, the Swedish improvisational quartet Mwendo Dawa maps out broad landscapes of stark beauty, roams the streets of cold, robotic cities and plows through oppressive, overgrown jungles of sound. In “Den Grimme Kylling” (“The Ugly Chicken”), for example, Lindeborg phases through a disorienting cycle of synth/piano chords, constantly shifting angles like a set of funhouse mirrors against Ove Johansson’s urgent tenor sax, David Sundby’s hushed drums and Jimmi Roger Pedersen’s furtive bass solo.