The recordings presented here are the artistic outcomes of the ESP Duos project. All duos feature Ivar Roban Križić (double bass) performing with one of three long-term collaborators: Thomas Grill (electroacoustics), Kasho Chualan (prepared piano), and Nikola Vuković (prepared trumpet). Across three recording sessions, Križić performed a remote duo with each musician under identical experimental conditions.
In each session, the two improvisers performed simultaneously in separate rooms, without the ability to hear or see one another. No sonic exchange, visual cue, or technological mediation was available during the performance. Only after each session were the two independently recorded parts combined into a single audio file.
For the performers, the improvisations unfolded as solitary actions oriented toward an absent partner. For the listener, however, the recordings reveal a composite sonic field in which independent musical trajectories intersect, diverge, and occasionally align. This asymmetry is central to the work: the listener becomes the only participant with access to the full musical situation.
The ESP Duos should not be approached as simulations of ensemble interaction. Instead, they foreground a particular mode of improvisational coherence that emerges through contingency, shared history, and imaginative orientation. Listening involves navigating moments of apparent synchronicity, disjunction, and delayed recognition, where meaning is often constructed retrospectively rather than through immediate interaction.
Each recording thus documents not only an improvisation, but an attempt to play together in absence—to orient musically toward another without perceptual access, relying instead on the residual traces of long-term collaboration.
