Pluckblow
Nemesis
Folk, jazz and contemporary styles influence much of this album, which features new music from Ireland, Australia, UK and Germany.
Craig Ogden and Gerard McChrystal set the thermometer high with their sinuous and heady interpretation of Andy Scott's Nemesis. Ogden's highly disciplined guitar lines traced a pinprick route through Scott's scarifying three movement set piece, while McChrystal burrowed and mined, and ultimately scaled its petulant peaks and troughs. McChrystal's saxophone swings acrobatically from high octane celebration to sweet and low down melancholy in one and the same breath, wheedling more and more layers of complexity from Ogden's distilled guitar lines.
Sugar Club, Dublin, The Irish Times, November 2006
Nemesis (1996-98; revised 2005) by Andy Scott, a 2006 British Composer Award-winner, arranged here by the performers, has guitar replacing the originally conceived vibraphone, with Ogden delivering pinprick jazz and latin pungency against the improvisatory contemporary classical accent demanded of McChrystal.
The Journal of Music, March 2007
