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Barre Phillips’s End to End album, released in 2018, brought the documentation of his music for solo bass to a profound conclusion. Now Face à Face returns the emphasis to collaborative work, to dialogue and shared creation, in improvisations with György Kürtág Jr. The Hungarian composer and improviser, last heard on ECM on the album Kurtágonals in 2009, describes his musical relationship with Barre as “one of the most important of my life” and on Face à Face it is immediately that the two musicians share an advanced understanding. It is an understanding patiently built up over the years. They have been developing their duo project – featuring double bass, synthesizers and digital percussion – since 2014, and it is texturally and dynamically absorbing, fascinating to follow. “The first image that comes to me to characterize the way I play with Barre is architectural. I am dealing with a musician whose playing and phrasing changes constantly and in the most unpredictable ways possible. To be in relation with his music I think of it as an individual on the move and I build rooms of both time and space around him. Rooms that are themselves in constant evolution. I could also say that I create a shadow, the shadow of Barre’s double bass, of his playing…but it is a dynamic shadow in which I place ‘attractors,’ that is to say, leads, directions, which are followed or not, but which contribute to maintaining the intensity of the dialogue between us.” - György Kurtág Jr.