The title of Rinse Cycle is not a subtle metaphor. After Sakina Abdou and Bill Nace are through, you might feel like you’ve been drenched and kicked around the inside of a washing machine. They didn’t call it Delicate Cycle for good reason.
Abdou is a saxophonist from Lille. Nace, a pillar of the Philadelphia scene, plays electric guitar and taishōgoto, a Japanese string instrument. He also messes with mics and amps, and not just for the feedback–on one track, he amplifies an egg shaker. The taishōgoto is just another way to get the jangly noise he’s after. There’s no sign of “world music” here.
Both improvisers are inveterate collaborators, and both tend to work in small groups. Abdou put out a solo sax album, and Nace has undertaken a plethora of duo sessions. Another 2025 release, Branches, pairs him with none other than Evan Parker. Unsurprisingly, Abdou and Nace sound like a complete unit. A third member might have struggled to fit in. (Although, with the right drummer, a Abdou/Nace-led trio would be explosive.)
Abdou is not afraid to play loud or fast–often at the same time. She likes to start proceedings with a squeal or a blast. But she tends not to play a lot of different notes. Some of her patterns sound like they might have come from a Coltrane practice session, only unlike Trane, she keeps repeating them.
This sort-of-but-not-really-minimalism makes for fun interactions with Nace. The guitarist offers dense chords that are sometimes barely distinguishable from noise. But out of those chords emerge manic riffs without any clear demarcation point between the two. A few of the best moments on this session are when Abdou and Nace end up playing sixteenth notes more or less simultaneously–a seemingly accidental unison.
On the 11-minute “Mega Capacity,” Nace takes out the taishōgoto and the interplay changes tack. He tends toward more melodic, conversational statements, and Abdou reacts accordingly. That isn’t to say it’s quiet or reflective. From this album, it’s hard to imagine that Nace would ever suffer that kind of conversation. The taishōgoto is a feedback-generating machine, too. We get a hint of what it might have sounded like in the hands of Jimi Hendrix.
Rinse Cycle is an engaging summit of two instrumentalists who, despite the long tradition of free improv, sound like no one except themselves.
