Dans The Difference Between a Fish, Doneda et Leimgruber sont sur la même longueur d'ondes de leurs saxophones. Ce disque est, en ce qui me concerne, l'enregistrement le plus significatif autour du guitariste Keith Rowe parmi son abondante production récente qui me soit parvenue. Rowe est un improvisateur très sollicité aujourd'hui. Il y a dix ans, en dehors d'AMM, personne ne faisait appel à l'inventeur de la guitare couchée. Les temps changent. Bravo au courage de Potlatch et à l'esprit d'aventure des musiciens !
Jean-Michel Van Schouwburg l Improjazz l juin 2004

Actif depuis deux ans, ce trio réunissant deux saxophonistes, Michel Doneda et Urs Leimgruber, et un guitariste, Keith Rowe, reflète les préoccupations de nombreux musiciens actuels liés aux musiques improvisées. Porté vers la recherche de nouvelles matières sonores, il mêle sons électroniques et sons acoustiques en brouillant les pistes, recherchant un terrain d'entente loin de tout recours mélodique ou rythmique distinct. En deux longues pièces, le trio reflète une démarche introspective où la tension nait d'infimes variations de textures et de densités. Sur la durée, s'installe une certaine pesanteur qui prend corps à travers des stridences et des bruissements renvoyant à une certaine mécanique post-industrielle. L'individu s'efface, dans un paysage éphèmère et ludique.
Thierry Lepin l Jazzman l Mai 2003

Un groupe, quand la musique est vivante, ce sont des volontés qui s'expriment, des désirs qui s'affirment, des rêves qui s'aventurent dans le risque, l'inconnu, l'inouï. Trois musiciens irréductibles, trois figures majeures de la création impromptue, soit un trio européen, le saxophoniste soprano français Michel Doneda, le saxophoniste ténor et soprano suisse Urs Leimgruber et le guitariste anglais Keith Rowe réussissent cela, ensemble, sans se départir jamais de leurs cheminements personnels. Ils savent se fondre dans l'ensemble pour servir la démarche collective, toutes leurs différences devenant des forces complémentaires, c'est leur force: c'est ce qui nous retient, à leur écoute. Ils tissent, dans l'éphémère de l'échange partagé, les liens d'une relation à trois étonnante de musique pleinenement vécue au cours de deux longues improvisations de près de trente minutes enregistrées en 2001 et 2002. L'invention, l'interaction, l'élégance de leur jeu feraient presque oublier qu'ils jouent de manière complètement spontanée. Primauté du jeu, primeur de l'improvisation, confiance dans l'instant, l'invention, l'instinct, le désir; refus des préméditations - le merveilleux ne manque jamais de réjouir qui sait attendre.
Franck Médioni l Octopus l Mai 2003

Le commun des jazzfans aurait tendance à estimer que Steve Lacy représente le point ultime du jeu au saxophone soprano, au-delà duquel plus rien ne serait possible. Disons plutôt que ses recherches sur l'instrument ont jeté des ponts vers d'autres manières (encore plus extrêmes et voluptueuses) d'envisager cet instrument délicat et capricieux. Michel Doneda est l'un de ceux qui ont entrepris de repenser radicalement. le soprano et d'en explorer les vibrations intimes, notamment à travers l'expérimentation d'un véritable tissage de micro-sons, souffles, growls et textures insaisissables où les notions conventionnelles de phrasé et d'articulation prennent un sens nouveau.
Créé en 1997 au festival Densités (Verdun), le trio formé avec le saxophoniste suisse Urs Leimgruber et le guitariste "de table" et joueur d'électronique anglais Keith Rowe dans The Difference Between a Fish n'est pas si éloigné dans ses intentions, même si l'étendue des couleurs et l'apport de l'électronique contribuent à apporter une dimension "symphonique" et une étonnante. puissance suggestive. La délicatesse de cette improvisation de groupe et la subtilité des interactions entre les protagonistes - un art bâti sur l'exploration du détail et de l'espace, où toute tentation égotiste et démonstrative est bannie - forcent l'auditeur à appréhender la musique de l'intérieur et à s'inventer de nouvelles techniques d'écoute.
Gérard Rouy l Jazz Magazine l Mars 2003

Two long tracks comprise The Difference Between A Fish, an oddly balanced album of saxophones - Doneda on soprano, Leimgruber playing tenor and soprano - and guitar electronics, by Rowe. A fifteen-month gap separates the recording of the The First Part from The Third Part but the music could just as easily be two bubbles blown from the same fish on the same breathful of water. Building up tension slowly through persistent, slight shifts of contour and color, the trio manages to hold our attention without actually gratifying it. It's like blowing a magnificently growing bubble with enough surface tension to repel a whale; it may be hollow inside, but we'lI never know because it doesn't break. These two improvisations invite us to glimpse a world of decelerated morphing, where the state of being is a state of foaming pressure. Without a climax or momentous change of direction to overtly alert our attention to sonic developments, The Difference Between A Fish depends on the listener's own ability to concentrate on the music, and on a willingness to be surrounded by sound, however unappealing.
The First Part from May of 2002, emerges breathy and minor, with long-breath sub-articulations burbling in from sax wavers. It sounds like vibrating flakes: close-miked reeds with a distant amplifier humming in and hovering out of audibility. Mice-like squeakiness surfaces and dematerializes from the saxes throughout this album, sometimes met with Rowe throwing static, at other times sharply shrill and potentialIy repellent. When Rowe's electronics surge out in front, I hear black outerspace jelly speckled with static like stars. Pockets of punctured air zip piercing through the atmosphere from Doneda and Leimgruber. Being mindful of their squeals prepares the listener to be responsive to the quality of detail accumulated over the entire course of the album.
Andrew Choate l Coda l January 2004

The most obvious way Keith Rowe’s legendary group AMM has affected the post-millenium improv world is that partly because of AMM’s influence, many improvisers now focus on texture rather than melody. But more subtly, AMM has helped cause a shift in improv values, at least in some quarters – free jazz is a battle among individual personalities, whereas post-AMMprov sounds less ego-driven.
Many recent improv albums in general, and most recent Rowe albums in particular, therefore are essentially a sound, a long collective exploration of a single texture. If there are major changes within Rowe’s recent improvisations, they usually develop slowly and tentatively, so they usually sound more like the exploratory drones of La Monte Young or Phill Niblock (albeit without the microtonal focus of the former or the maximal textures of the latter) than anything suggested by the word “improv.”
The Difference Between A Fish is less static than most of Rowe’s recent releases, which isn’t saying much in itself, but its volume shifts may surprise you if you’re not paying attention too closely as you listen. Rowe is joined here by saxophonists Michel Doneda and Urs Leimgruber (from France and Switzerland, respectively), who both use a vocabulary of hissing, fluttering extended techniques that is becoming increasingly common in texture-based improv. Unlike many who utilize these techniques, however, Doneda and Leimgruber often play in an openly expressive manner rather than emphasizing any similarity their scrapes and squeals might have to electronic or environmental sounds. Rowe’s playing on guitar (used in a tabletop setup that never particularly sounds like a guitar) and electronics keep Doneda and Leimgruber from taking flight, giving them a reference point that limits their choices with regard to pitch, timbre and balance. Even The Third Part, in which Rowe’s playing is punctuated by silences, creates the sense that Rowe’s presence keeps the other musicians from playing too expressively or otherwise drawing too much attention to themselves.
For this reason, The Difference Between A Fish isn’t as well suited to passive listening as some of Rowe’s recent projects (which isn’t to say, by the way, that any of them are meant to be listened to passively). There’s an enormous amount of tension here, with Rowe lingering on the periphery while Doneda and Leimgruber struggle to hold themselves back.
Charlie Wilmoth l Dusted Magazine l November 2003


It's hard to believe that just a few years back, Keith Rowe had only a small handful of releases available outside of his output with AMM. The last few years has seen a virtual explosion of activity, from solos to the sprawling collective explorations of MIMEO. He has, rightfully, taken on a role as a prime instigator and seminal voice in an approach to collective improvisation that eschews linear interaction or the muscular bravado of free jazz for a more rarefied aesthetic of sonic exploration.
The Difference Between a Fish captures Rowe in an unusual setting; mixing it up with two reed players. Of course, as with any endeavor like this, it all comes down to the choice in partners. Doneda seems a logical choice, having spent the last two decades charting out an approach to the soprano sax that melds the elemental components of breath, microtonality, and extended techniques, with an acute attention to the interaction of sound, silence, and performance space. Leimgruber is an odder choice, coming as he does from more of a free jazz foundation. (Though his intensely intimate duets with percussionist Fritz Hauser certainly reveal a penchant for this type of setting.)
From the initial fluttering reed pops over Rowe's low hums and hanging harmonics, this meeting is a study in uneasy balance. The trick here is to avoid a delineation into foreground (reed activity) and background (Rowe's buzzes and rumbles) and for much of the time over the course of the two long improvisations, they manage to pull it off.
The disc opens with The First Part as Doneda's burred, breathy rasps spill in wispy whorls over Rowe's shifting ground. Leimgruber shifts back and forth from pinched overtones to stuttering trills and scribbles, pulling Doneda into more active textures and gestural interactions. On the earlier of the two pieces (the oddly titled The Third Part which comes second on the disc) agitated activity of the two reeds hovers over Rowe's dark, scraped reverberations. Midway through, Doneda and Leimgruber synch into quiet, whistling overtones that quaver like feedback over the almost transparent recesses Rowe creates, generating a breathless tension. Rowe draws this out with a masterful sense of atmospheric arc to a haunting conclusion. Not all of this works as seamlessly as it could, but it is an exploration well worth checking out.
Michael Rosenstein l Signal To Noise l July 2003

The Difference Between a Fish is a meeting of legendary AMM guitarist Keith Rowe with French saxophonist Michel Doneda and Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber. Taken from two separate German radio recordings in Aachen and Bremen, the disc consists of two extended improvisations, The First Part and The Third Part. Doneda describes his own music as "vibrating the air", and such an expression is quite apt in reference to the trio's work on this disc.
Rowe, known already as an innovative and iconoclastic guitarist who left behind any and all conventional ideas and technique long ago, plays little that could easily be attributed to the guitar by a blindfolded listener. His sonic palette of clicks, scrapes, and whirs lurks in the background of the music much of the time, though, much of the time, due to the music's low volume, it seems as though Doneda, Leimgruber, and Rowe are each in the background of a sonic painting with no foreground. This allows for a more even listening experience in which sounds need not be loud to be startling and the instruments come together easily to create a cohesive whole. Rowe's work tends to be more ambient in nature; often his sounds are the base off of which the two saxophonists propel their improvisations. Tentative, sonorous tones from the saxophones snake their way into Rowe's more rough-edged work, with distant calls and yelps heard in between. There's little noise that the microphones don't pick up, so everything is heard, every breathy expulsion of sound, every minute click, every wavering, miniscule note. This leads for little room for anything out of place, and each musician does an excellent job of staying within the confines that seem have been set before the performances. Though the temptation to increase in volume may have been great, Doneda, Leimgruber, and Rowe manage to create a sense of almost scary tension and intensity that relies not on volume and power, but a more delicate balance that allows for nothing in the way of quick corrections, pulling back, or hiding deep in the mix.
The two performances captured on this CD differ little, and it's sometimes easy to feel as though the duration of the disc could have been halved, but, given the correct environment and mindset, The Difference Between a Fish can be a very rewarding and captivating recording. Just remember that power isn't all wattage and brawn, and sometimes the quiet sounds are the ones that garner the ear's most rapt attention.
Adam Strohm l Fakejazz.com l April 2003

The saxophone finds itself in a problematic position in much contemporary, freely improvised music. It has a strong tendency to carry a huge amount of baggage. A great deal of that "baggage", of course, is part of a beautiful tradition, but placed in a context where the non-idiomatic is prized, that history can become something of a stumbling block toward achieving the desired transparency of content. For some reason, reed players seem to be affected more than brass. Trumpets and trombones can merge more seamlessly with strings or electronics, perhaps because they lack the innate human cry that is part and parcel of the saxophone and which human ears tend to conceptually isolate. Keith Rowe is acutely aware of this issue and, almost quixotically, has insisted on working in projects with saxophonists, seeking a happy medium or, better still, looking to influence reed players to shed more and more of their historical weight. Michel Doneda would seem to be a prime candidate, someone who has already reduced his soprano to, as has been described previously, more a metallic tube with holes in it than a musical instrument. Urs Leimgruber, though capable of relatively extreme playing, appears somewhat more wedded to the tradition.
This disc consists of two lengthy tracks, one recorded in 2001, the other in 2002. In both, Rowe, as has been his wont in recent year, virtually disappears as an active musical participant, instead filling the role of "canvas". I'm reasonably certain that he would have liked his collaborators to follow him to this point (and then, maybe, out of it) but the difficulties quickly become apparent. Doneda does, in the first piece, rein himself in a bit, concentrating on breathy hisses more often than reedy notes, but still he sets himself apart from the group sound, unable to recede from the foreground. Leimgruber fares even less well, offering the sort of trills he produces in performance with Joelle Leandre; they might work wonderfu lly there, they sound intrusive here.
Oddly enough, though recorded earlier, the second track works a bit better, though largely for the deep area Rowe explores during its latter half. The saxophonists appear to have been farther behind in their "lessons" (maybe they were revolting against Rowe's dictum!), placing themselves even further up front, steering the trio into a relatively mundane, though by no means unaccomplished, type of free improv that has been heard quite often over the last 20 or so years. Again, it's not bad music-it's a far sight better than much out there-but Rowe is aiming at vastly different prey, something he seems to allude to almost directly as he sends his guitar plummeting into the abyss for the last few minutes of the piece (reminding me, strangely enough, of parts of the original Fripp/Eno recordings). Though the experiment can't be deemed an unqualified success, its failures (and the reasons for them) are fascinating enough to easily warrant a listen by those interested in this type of problem.
Brian Olewnick l The Squid’s Ear l March 2003