For London's Freedom of the City Festival Mattin's Sakada materializes in a big band incarnation. Unexpectedly, the larger the group, the smaller the sound. In contrast to Sakada's dense previous recordings as the trio of Mattin, Prévost and Rosy Parlane, here the expanded Sakada navigate a more restrained and open territory. Droning passages rise and ebb in blocks, the sound folding over on itself, while minute textures dance on the edges. The emphasis on bowed sounds (Prévost's cymbals, Davies' harp, Garcia's bass, Wastell's objects and Mattin's computer casing (!!!)) brings to mind the slow churning of a Morton Feldman composition, yet mutated further into the realm of the unexpected and abstract. This recording finds a group as attuned to the space in between as they are to each other. An intense document of precisely restrained improvisation.

"Planes converge and intersect, bowed and rubbed into existence, shadowed by a hatch of rustles and rumbling. There's almost diagrammatic clarity to a mobile structure of tensions that charges the music, a structure of unplayed and unplayable elements that exists virtually yet vitally in relationships between sounds that can actually be heard. At the same time, correspondence and contrast within the fabric of the piece, its fibre and textured substance, are crucial. The outcome is restrained but not reductive; music as a material process, galvanised by the current of collective attentiveness."
- Julian Cowley, The Wire #248

"...a rich improvisation in which the bowings of Davies, Garcia and Prévost (the latter mainly on tam-tam) combine with the resonant clunks and subtler rustles and tones of the amplified textures and electronics in a captivating and diverse sequence of transient configurations and subdued moments."
- Wayne Spencer, Paris Transatlantic, November 2004

"...these whines, grumbles, and contact mic clicks coalesce into a slow-roiling surge that suggests both the gradual melting of some dirty glacier and Feldman's Rothko Chapel reworked for Luigi Russolo's mythical noise contraptions."
- Joe Panzner, Grooves 015

"The careful selection and placement of sounds in the music are what matter most. Sonic events occur simultaneously, or overlap, and in the process the music thickens and thins and accumulates complexity."
- Brian Marley, The Wire #232

"Well proportioned systems work symbiotically and there's a slight AMM flavour somewhere; the details are exceptionally clear, the musicians maintaining a mysterious restraint which is the basis for a kind of laboratory soundtrack where each sonic alchemist wants to make companions aware of his [or her] important discovery."
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes, August 2004

"...an uncommonly beautiful set, all ears directed inward, listening for the next breath just drawn from the air."
- Jon Dale, Stylus Magazine, July 2004

"It is as if little by little the sound is thrown into the void."
- Fader Magazine (Japan) 2004 / vol 010