There’s something quietly miraculous about this self-titled Poor Isa + Evan Parker / Ingar Zach - a record that sounds less like four musicians performing together and more like a slow, collective act of listening. You could call it a collaboration, but that word feels too social, too crowded. What happens here is more like shared solitude: four distinct sensibilities circling a silence and learning how to breathe inside it.

The Belgian duo Poor Isa (Ruben Machtelinckx and Frederik Leroux) have always worked with restraint as both method and philosophy - their prepared banjos and woodblocks tracing sound as if they were chiseling ice, not playing instruments. Their previous records floated between stillness and pulse, hinting at a kind of ascetic joy. Here, that aesthetic deepens and fractures: they invite Evan Parker, the titan of European free improvisation, and Ingar Zach, master of percussive resonance, to step into their miniature universe - and remarkably, neither of them trample the garden.

Parker, whose soprano saxophone can usually turn air into hurricane, moves like a shadow here, trading density for grain. His lines flicker and hover, ghostly and deliberate, like breath condensed on glass. Zach, ever the sculptor of vibration, gives the record a subterranean pulse - his gran cassa rumbling not as rhythm but as weather.

What’s astonishing is the balance: these four musicians - each with a history of commanding sonic presence - dissolve ego into texture. “Clearing” feels like a dawn where every sound negotiates its right to exist; “Hewn” stretches into a slow ritual of erosion, each gesture scraping at the edge of audibility. Even the track titles read like verbs of process rather than products - "Ply", "Hewn", "Clearing" - as if the music itself were documenting an act of making rather than made-ness.

There’s a kind of dry humor, too, if you listen for it - a playfulness in how banjo strings are muted into near-silence, how Parker’s saxophone occasionally bursts in like a polite interruption from another world. It’s the sound of four people not taking the idea of “serious music” too seriously - but treating sound itself as sacred.

At times, the album recalls the early ECM aesthetic of distance and space, but with more splinters, more air between the notes. It’s chamber music for a room that doesn’t exist - a liminal zone where wood vibrates like metal, and silence carries its own melodic contour.
In a world where collaboration often means collision, Poor Isa + Evan Parker / Ingar Zach offers something rarer: integration without compromise. It’s music that unfolds like careful conversation between strangers who have already understood each other, wordlessly.
And perhaps that’s the real beauty of this record - it’s not about showing what these artists *can* do, but about what they’re willing to leave undone.