Botanikk CD review – Pauline Oliveros's restlessly alert collaboration

One of the great recurring traits in the music of Pauline Oliveros – the 84-year-old accordionist/improviser who in the 80s invented a “deep listening” practice to spur us into “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing” – is how she’s always a friend to her audience, always aware of how and where and why we might get something from a piece of improvisation. She’s also a restlessly alert collaborator, and this release from Norwegian label Atterklang brings her together with some of Norway’s most adventurous youngish-generation improvisers: vocalist Lisa Dillan, bass player Øyvind Storesund and pianist Else Olsen Storesund. It’s an album all about plants, seven tracks named after seven northerly flowers, with a delicate Saxifraga Cotyledon (filmy, tentative), a creepy devil’s-bit scabious (barbed, nasal), a stoic arctic starflower primrose (gorgeously mulchy sounds from Øyvind Storesund). In Calluna Vulgaris – purple heather – Oliveros’s accordion makes a hardy centrifugal point to skittish textural stuff from the others, but elsewhere she’s the one who instigates the flightiest directions of play.