Once live in Ghent, once live in New York, Belgian composer and electric guitarist Guy De Bievre steers a sextet through Bending the Tonic. The composer's sleevenote suggests that this music is what happens "when you read Schoenberg while listening to Bukka White." This is a vivid description, although neither version delivers an obvious grafting of theoretical Vienna onto the Mississippi Delta. De Bievre is alluding to the music's unusual harmonic organisation and its 144 bar structure, the squaring of a 12 bar blues. Flautist Anne La Berge and wonderful Downtown trombonist Peter Zummo bring their expertise and wealth of performing experience to both occasions. In Ghent, Michael Weilacher contributes percussion, Xavier Verhelst plays electric bass and Stephie Buettrich supplies vocals. In New York, those roles are taken respectively by former Arthur Russell associates Mustafa Ahmed, Ernie Brooks and Jolei. In both cases, all instruments but bass and percussion are subject to occasional sampling, processing and playback by an automated computer programme. The result is certainly a singular music, absorbing yet elusive and not easy to pin down or sum up. Polystylistic in its ingredients, open to improvisatory surprise and indeterminate events, it is nonetheless readily identifiable as the same piece in two versions. Both start with the droning of a sustained pitch, then move through six sections, each with a given chord or scale for each musician to explore. De Bievre at times evokes blues playing overtly with quiet licks of slide, and Buettrich's singing and intoning from a preset list of words includes some gruff growling with a bluesy grain. But a whole range of musical options are realised in the 40 minutes in Ghent and 51 minutes of the slower progression in New York. In that respect Bending the Tonic makes me sense some familial relationship with those revelatory multicentred auditory spaces opened up by the musicians of Chicago's AACM, rooted yet casting up unexpected and unpredictable forms. Hybrids may have become the norm but this release still stands out as refreshingly unclassifiable. And Zummo is superb. [Julian Cowley - Wire Magazine 12/2005]