VyZ released "FREEDOM" in 2015. The next year we used the Aeon visualizer by SoundSpectrum, Inc. to create a 60 minute movie that was released in July 2016 as "SEE THE MUSIC."

"I’ve recently been reading about Mindfullness, or paying attention with purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgementally. With reference to sounds, mindfulness is greeting sounds without attaching meaning and to simply experience them as they are, as sonic events with their own qualities.

I attended to the sonic event that is VyZ’s Freedom album as one uncertainly returning to free improvisation, not having attempted to listen through such music since my postgraduate days over ten years ago. Too soon I began hunting for points of reference, attaching meanings and seeking anything around which to orient my experience. Was that Miles’ In a Silent Way? Is this section King Crimson improvising in the early 2000s, as something Mellotron-like swirled by in-between electronic beats, bleeps and whirring? Even sounds from Orbital’s In Sides album assailed me, such that I had to go listen to a few tracks from that record before returning to this one.

As I listened more I began to drop some of these expectations and comparisons and, instead, hear what was there – the sounds and their interconnections. As VyZ put it, this music is “just the pure, uninhibited sound created on the spot...”, and that’s what I take for this great record, the drive to listen freely, to listen mindfully and escape the expectations set up by sounds I know. Highlights for me included the gentle groove of The Climb and Rich Damone’s seemingly backward bass lines; Charlie Tokarz’ harmonised sax on the opening title track; John Pritchard’s electronic groves slicing through the nebulous space of Land Ho; and, throughout, Adam Holzman’s enveloping harmonic voice.

Hearing Orbital, Miles, John Zorn, Pink Floyd, Keith Jarrett, King Crimson and a million other things is what I brought to the music and VyZ helped me to hear beyond this, to listen with greater clarity and divested of some measure of expectation.

To write a review of VyZ’s music as an insider- a Free Improv aficionado- would be meaningless and, I hope, immediately exposed as a man talking nonsense. Maybe my perspective will make you go out and pick up VyZ’s Freedom for yourself. Better to call it ‘freeing improvisation’."

5 Stars

—Adam Moore, Guitarist at Listen to Adam on Spotify