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Eye of the Storm

LaDonna Smith

Richard Scott, Wire, 1993

The difference between improvisation I want to listen to and that which I don’t, probably comes down to something like personality. Every note of LaDonna Smith’s music has something of this quality, as well as a physical directness and a happy foolishness which says, “yes, I know this is silly, but . . . ”

Her solo voice, viola and violin CD scrapes and howls, whistles and whinnys, often making strange allusions to a variety of genres but mainly alluding to nothing much at all. There is a convincing seriousness of purpose behind her highly accomplished stream-of-consciousness playing, most fully revealed in the searching title track.