The JUNO award-winning Vancouver-based guitarist, composer improvisor, and master oud player Gordon Grdina is a dauntless musical explorer whose interests run the gamut from free improvisation and progressive jazz to traditional Arabic music, often weaving deftly between those desperate extremes.

Two new releases on his own Attaboygirl Records imprint showcase the stunning diversity of Grdina’s imagination: the third release by his jazz-Arabic music hybrid band The Marrow expands to include the captivating Persian vocalist Fathieh Honari, while Duo Work is a dizzying multi-directional collaboration between Grdina’s electric and MIDI guitars and the virtuosic German drummer Christian Lillinger.

While Grdina often moves from guitar to oud within the space of a single project or album, these two new efforts draw a hard line between the two. Gordon Grdina’s The Marrow with Fathieh Honari is a showcase for his deft oud work.

Duo Work is a wildly different project, electrifying and angular where The Marrow is trance-like and questing. The album continues the thrilling collaboration between Grdina and Lillinger, which has been documented via the quartet Square Peg (with violist Mat Maneri and bassist Shahzad Ismally) and a trio with Maneri.

Throughout Grdina is featured on guitar and MIDI guitar, a relatively new addition to his arsenal previously heard on Oddly Enough, a solo album featuring the compositions of Tim Berne. The instrument features synth pick-ups with MIDI controllers that allow Grdina to transform the sound of the guitar into virtually any instrument - existent or otherwise.

The axe makes for a perfect pairing with Lillinger’s expansive sound. “I wanted to fill a large sound space since Christian is quite an orchestral drummer,” Grdina explains. “I wanted to create a large sound world that could define many specific timbral spaces while retaining the freedom of an improvising duo that can turn on a dime.”

The album features four of Grdina’s compositions along with a set of improvised excursions. Each of the set’s concise pieces (most under four minutes) were isolated from longer free improvisations, chosen for their bold sense of structure and intentionality, then manipulated in post-production in a final act of (re)composition.

Grdina assigned song titles based on an impulsive sensory association. Indeed, Gerhard, named for the artist Gerhard Richter, is a clue to the overall sound.

“His paintings feel so metallic, modern and bright, yet have this warmth and soothing feeling to them,” Grdina explains. “I wanted to stress the humanity that comes through these pieces that don’t seem very natural on the surface.”

1. Song One
2. Dissolution
3. Impala
4. Bunker
5. Ash
6. Encounters
7. Pixilated
8. Jalopy
9. Gerhard
10. Big Blue
11. Traverse
12. Song Two

This supremely impassioned, heartfelt and gloriously structured new recording opens on the dogged Song One and the technical brilliance of Dissolution and they are then backed by the nuanced Impala, the rhythmically jaunty Bunker, and then comes the unyielding punk-jazz of Ash and the dynamically industrious Encounters.

Along next is one of my own personal favorites here, the resonating Pixilated and the multiple palettes woven within Jalopy and they are in turn followed seamlessly by the textural Gerhard, the guitar-electronic blending within Big Blue, the album rounding out on the incisive Traverse, coming to a close on the atmospheric Song Two.

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