In her duo with electric guitarist Stian Westerhus, on the 2012 concert recording „Didymoi Dreams“ and this no less impressive sequel, Endresen foregrounds the voice housed in flesh. And her performance certainly bring home the multiple functions of the mouth… there´s nothing quite like it. Westerhus is the perfect foil – a musician positioned as far from air guitar as Endresen is from disembodied voice. When it fits he can get shimmery and vaporous, shadowing Endresen as she recoils into vulnerability; but mostly he provides her with a suitably splintered, jagged accompaniment packed with metallic crackle and twang and shrewdly manipulated textural electronics. Both performers sound at once strictly disciplined and dangerously spontaneous, razor sharp and vividly physical. Both plunge in deep and stretch their own limits.
The Wire (UK)
On their second album, this Norwegian duo—veteran singer Sidsel Endresen and hotshot experimental guitarist Stian Westerhus—dive into their improvisations with increasing fearlessness, colliding wordless abstraction and floor-ratting physicality. Endresen once trafficked in a sort of post-Joni Mitchell jazz-folk sound, but now she has a language all her own: an imaginary vocabulary, elucidated in a halting tumble of cracked, wheezy, or glottal vocalizations. Westerhus uses a phalanx of effects pedals that transforms his atmospheric guitar into a miniature symphony, adding flurries of violence, smatterings of percussive noise, and fountains of gnarled feedback. The two musicians play off each other deftly but furiously, and their jagged, high-flying dance is as exciting, imaginative, and visceral as anything I’ve heard in years.
Chicago Reader (US)