Bill Meyer's review from Dusted Magazine, January 11, 2018:

"Familiarity, novelty and antiquity entwine to make something rare on The Spectrum Does. You have probably already heard Robbie Lee and Che Chen in other settings. Lee co-runs Telegraph Harp records and writes/plays/sings in Creative Automatic; he’s also a utility player who has joined the bands of Baby Dee, Neil Hagerty, Brightblack Morning Light, Cass McCombs and Talibam! Chen, of course, plays guitar in 75 Dollar Bill, but has also made records on his own and with Tetuzi Akiyama and Chie Mukai. And for about five years, Chen and Lee had a partnership that encompassed intense wood shedding, a bit of playing out, one prior LP and a tour and record with Jozef Van Wissem under the banner Heresy of the Free Spirit.

Chen and Lee first got together to play bass clarinet duos. That early practice of playing the same instrument probably has something to do with the ego-less cohesion of their music, but there was no way they’d stick to just one instrument. Lee collects ancient instruments and Chen is also a multi-instrumentalist; no doubt Van Wissem was drawn to them because they not only played portative organ, bass recorder and harmonium, but improvised non-idiomatically with those instruments.

The Spectrum Does is drawn from two performances that took place in 2011, one at Issue Project Room and the other at Glasslands. On side one Lee comes out swinging, blowing his taragato like Peter Brötzmann (the Eastern European reed instrument’s main contemporary proponent) was looking over his shoulder. Chen responds to his tough, tunneling lines with coarse, choppy fiddle scrapes that sound like Tony Conrad playing the way a traffic cop talks until their abraded timbres fall together and then subside into a machine-like whir. Next, delay-distorted sounds rise and retreat from a carpet of harmonium, turning the vibe both prayerful and apprehensive. Then the violin returns, still Conrad-like, but Lee counters with a slow, pastoral melody played on a great bass recorder.

Some improvisers might keep duking it out, but Chen switches to bass recorder himself. Whether they relate aggressively or passively, even when you can tell who is playing what, that seems to matter less than the consonance of mood and uncertainty of century that they create together — there are passages where it sounds like some Hungarian goat herder from the 1760s is playing with some turtlenecked freaks in a 1960s NYC art loft via a time portal held open by vibrantly fluttering magnetic tape. There’s really nothing else around that sounds like this stuff, and it’s a shame that the duo is done, but we have another piece of analog magic to tell you what they sounded like — this fine record."

//// more about the record:

Multi-instrumentalist, Robbie Lee and I improvised together several times a week for much of the mid-2000s, a period bookended by two records, "Begin & Continue!" which we self-released in 2008 and this record, "The Spectrum Does, completed in 2011 and finally available from Belgian imprint, AudioMER. From the label's press release:

On The Spectrum Does, New York avant-rock musicians Che Chen and Robbie Lee create three earthy and slow moving pieces, informed as much by various global folk traditions as they are by 20th century composition and improvisation. Their ‘anything goes’ approach to improvising leads to a sonic document that sounds raw, intense and freshly exciting. A wild and shambolic brew sounding like nothing else.

Che Chen is musician and visual artist currently best known for his work with percussionist Rick Brown as 75 Dollar Bill. In the mid 2000s he formed this duo with composer and producer Robbie Lee, who at the time played with people like Baby Dee and Neil Hagerty. Their most concentrated period of activity is bookended by a first LP they self-released in 2008 called Begin & Continue! and this record, The Spectrum Does, which contains music recorded several years later.

On The Spectrum Does, both tackle a range of un­conven­tional instruments like bass recorders, Renaissance clarinet, glissando flute, tarogato, electrified violin, ultraslow recorders and custom modified tape machines. While their first LP documented their earliest, mostly acoustic improvisations, The Spectrum Does captures Che and Robbie after 5 or so years of meeting two or three times week and multiple tours around the country (a couple of times as a part of Jozef van Wissem’s band Heresy Of The Free Spirit). By now what was pulsing out of their little overdriven tube amps was even more electrified and warped. Sounds of unknown origin seem to bubble up to the surface, met by completely unique approaches to wind and string instruments.

Much boundary pushing improvised music gets described as ‘outer limits’ but on The Spectrum Does, it seems much more right to say they explore the ‘inner limits’. It is deep listening music, but not minimalist; complex but not virtuosic. Dissonances intermingle with folk harmonies and rhythms. As with all of the music this duo made together, there’s a sort of shambolic-shamanic sensibility to it, but without a motive or explicit purpose. To be filed close to your Tony Conrad, Henry Flynt, Pelt, The Dead C records.

Some words from the duo on The Spectrum Does

Che Chen: The long improvisation that starts on the first side and spills onto the next was recorded live at a gig opening for Loren Connors and Suzanne Langille’s incredible band, Haunted House, at Issue Project Room in the Spring of 2011 (back when they were in the Can Factory space). I remembering it being a strong set, crashing out of the gate with Robbie’s tangled tarogato lines and my splintered violin stabs before careening onward with the kind of harnessed, intensity that one always hopes will appear when improvising… The recordings that make up the bulk of the second side were made in a dark and airless practice space in the back of the Glasslands, a now defunct DIY space in South Williamsburg. The sound is more insular, turned inward instead of exploding out like the live set, and is pretty representative of how single minded the explorations that made up our weekly “sessions” could be.

Robbie Lee: These pieces have the feeling of field recording, capturing rehearsals in their best moments, so a sense of freedom is everywhere, the kind of freedom that can collapse at any moment. But they are also the result of years of a developing a very close language, specific to this duo alone. We originally began playing together as bass clarinet duos, and for a while as bass recorder duos. So even when we are playing radically different instruments, there’s still this very real feeling that neither of us know who’s generating which sound, in this floating cloud of vibration. This is partially because of Che’s use of tape machines, custom modified to loop and play at different speeds, to reiterate and regurgitate my sounds, and then his own as well.

Che Chen: Not long after the Issue show, things fell apart, as they often do, and I went off and spent a couple of years collaborating with people in the Japanese underground before woodshedding hard on the electric guitar and starting 75 Dollar Bill. Meanwhile, Robbie made another record of his idiosyncratic songs (this time as Creature Automatic) and seemed to be focusing his considerable knowledge and technique on getting really good at one of the more unassuming instruments in his toolbox, the open-holed flute. I didn’t listen to Spectrum during the 5 years it sat on the shelf, but hearing it now, I love the openness and spirit of adventure. All the angles we were working on seem well-represented. I hear the synthesis of all the hours we spent playing together, and of all the hours we spent listening to music, another important part of those times. I hear our commitment to creating a shared language, a framework for making music spontaneously in the moment. But most of all I hear two people finding their way, pushing and supporting each other in sound.