The collaboration of composer Allison Cameron and trombonist Scott Thomson dates from the late 2000s, when Thomson presided over Somewhere There, a Toronto loft space used by creative, improvising musicians. Their new recording is dedicated to the late Nobuo Kubota, multimedia artist and member of long-running Toronto improvising groups the Artists’ Jazz Band and CCMC. Cameron inherited his crackle-box synthesizer. Those relationships between place, personalities, and instruments define the special ground of Platanus (the genus of plane trees or sycamores), three extended instrumental dialogues between Cameron on synthesizer, keyboards, and tapes and Thomson on trombone. Taproot, Bark, and Limbing represent three substantial chunks of wildly exploratory improvisation, running from fifteen to twenty-four minutes.

The recording process admits repetition and simultaneous extractions and intrusions, which leads to music that is more temporally complex and polyvocal than one might initially imagine from a duo, stretching and connecting playful highs and subterranean lows into miracles of technology and technique. The final track, Limbing, initially matches the myriad glassy sonic events of the synthesizer with a quiet, barely articulated mumble from the trombone that might suggest small woodland creatures. These are sounds that will eventually expand their identities, as the keyboards’ layered bleeps and whirrs and the trombone’s more vocalic muted mutterings, all in some sense still lightly lyrical, assume their most abstract ultimate identities.

Toronto composer, performer, and improviser Allison Cameron has carved out a distinctive niche in Canadian new music since the mid-1980s, her work marked by an instrumental kaleidoscope and gentle waywardness that tends to elude quick summary. Born in Edmonton and trained at the University of Victoria and York University, she settled in Toronto in 1989, eventually earning a Bang on a Can All-Stars commission that brought her piece November to Lincoln Center in 1994. Montréal trombonist Scott Thomson needs little introduction in these circles: co-founder of AIMToronto, former head of the Guelph Jazz Festival, current Artistic Director of FIMAV, and a player whose allegiance to open improvisation runs bone-deep. The two first crossed paths in 2007 in a trio with the late Toronto polymath Nobuo Kubota. It took the better part of two decades for a proper duo record to materialize. Better late than never.

The instrument at the center of Platanus is not the trombone. It is a plywood-cased, homemade crackle synthesizer that once belonged to Kubota and eventually made its way to Cameron. When Thomson heard her playing it in 2022, he promptly dubbed it the “Cadillac Cracklebox” — a name that does most of the descriptive work on its own. The album is dedicated to Kubota’s memory, and something of his restless, mischievous spirit seems to have followed the instrument into the studio.

Three extended pieces work through Platanus with deliberate arboreal logic, moving from grounded rumble to more exposed terrain. Thomson coaxes breaths, squeaks, and near-melodic smears from his horn with the patience of a player who treats silence as a viable option. Cameron’s arsenal — Cracklebox, additional keyboards, and scattered tapes—answers with clicks, white noise, timbral eruptions and Thomson’s multiphonics that arrive on their own schedule. What sets Cameron and Thomson apart from the broader electroacoustic free improvisation pile is the quality of listening between them—genuinely responsive, at times conversational, elsewhere resembling a quiet disagreement between people who respect each other too much to raise their voices.

Platanus is prickly, patient, and not for the faint of ear—which is precisely what recommends it. Cameron and Thomson have waited nearly twenty years to make this record, and the restraint that shaped that timeline shows up in the music itself. Nothing here is rushed, nothing overstated. It is a small ensemble by any measure, but the sonic world these two construct is anything but.

Both Cameron and Thomson are well-pedigreed Canadian composer-improvisors, the latter founding Toronto’s creative music hub Somewhere There, a consistent haunt for the former to express her sonic imagination. Years later, Thomson calls Montréal home and Cameron continues to prowl Toronto, wielding the “Cadillac Cracklebox,” a homemade electronic sound generator. On Platanus, the pair dissolve music into its emotion-generating constituent parts. The sounds are both challenging and levity-inducing: Thomson’s trombone becomes a puddle of boiling gurgles, hisses, and outright zaniness while Cameron reveals the multi-hued universe existing within the confines of her synth. Across three lengthy improvisations, the pair stretch their instruments to their limits together, with the symbiosis only a pair of long-time sparring partners can conjure.

Montréal based experimental music label Ambiances Magnétiques has published two new albums: Le sourire, a Steve Lacy tribute by Canadian artists Jean Derome & Somebody Special, and Platanus by the duo of noted Toronto-based composer-improviser Allison Cameron (crackle synthesizer, keyboards, tapes), and Montréal’s Scott Thomson (on trombone). It’s the latter album that I want to draw attention to. It’s so out-of-world.

Platanus is pure abstract music born out of Thomson’s timbral experiments, and Cameron’s unique and unusual instrumentation, which showcases the Crackle Synthesizer and other keyboards (audibly the Casio SK-1) and tapes. The audible results such that it is hard to get grip on at any level. This is utterly bizarre! Truly tough material! I wouldn’t even say in a positive way but confusing, disturbing and unexplained way. But also thoroughly compelling and captivating. A mystery.

“The near-hour’s worth of music pulls listeners into a uniquely disorienting topography, painting a confounding scenery — a place that feels perched precariously on the cusp between dreaming and wakefulness. Within this wobbly frame, their interplay variously floats, wafts, gurgles, and drifts, a curious assortment of textures and murky hues.”

Another quote: “What they produce collectively resists easy description and that’s precisely what makes it so resonant. Their elusive semi-hush feels as like something was piped in from another reality.” I agree. Give it a try. You decide.

The release is dedicated to the memory of Nobuo Kubota, the extraordinary Canadian improviser and intermedia artist who passed away in September of 2025 at the age of 93. The duo had played as a trio with Kubota, and the aforementioned Crackle Synthesizer in fact used to belong to the elder artist.

Trombone and “homemade” synthesizer, this is the improbable duo that Platanus showcases for the most discerning music lovers. It is indeed ultra-free music, noise-driven but playful most of the time, featuring wacky sounds from the two instrumentalists present, Scott Thomson on trombone and Allison Cameron on synthesizer. The Montréaler and the Torontonian shatter all imaginable systems over the course of three long, largely improvised pieces. Squeaks, breaths, clicks, white noise, sometimes vaguely “melodic” lines, all the possibilities generated by extended techniques on the trombone and the particular timbres of Cameron’s synthesizer (an instrument built by a friend and colleague of both artists, which Thomson calls the “Cadillac Cracklebox”), intertwine in atomistic settings traversed by waves and some more or less vehement eruptions.

A music that is as contemporary and demanding as it gets, but satisfying, for receptive and adventurous ears.