"Living," wrote John Cage in 1952, "takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one's ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one's thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical." Many improvising musicians today pay lip-service to Cage, but very few perform music which really lets sounds be themselves. Since 1993, trombonist and composer Radu Malfatti has been exploring "the lull in the storm", crafting exquisite and truly minimal (as opposed to minimalist) music, both composed (a 1997 album on Timescraper featuring a solo trombone piece and a string quartet slipped out almost unnoticed, like the music it contained) and improvised. Back in Wire 187, Tony Herrington described "Beinhaltung", the first album by this trio released on the Italian Fringes label as "sonic microbiology", perhaps unfortunately invoking images of (e)motionless white-coated boffins peering at petri-dishes, whilst in fact the music is as alive and colourful as a butterfly floating across a sunlit footpath - and about that quiet. True, trying to listen to this while the rest of the household is zapping monsters on a Playstation or watching a Dukes of Hazzard re-run just won't do it justice. This music won't necessarily demand your attention (it's too subtle for that), but it needs your attention, and once you've entered its intimate world of creaks and crackles, you realise that there's an enormous amount of activity going on. "Dach" is German for roof, and the plastic roof of the school building in Ulrichsberg, Austria, where this performance took place in 1999 becomes the uninvited fourth member of the group: the album opens with the sound of rainfall dying away, after which the roof begins to crack and buckle in the sunshine. Phil Durrant's meticulous high violin harmonics, Thomas Lehn's exquisitely-placed analogue synth reverberations (accompanied by occasional gasps.. of delight?) and Malfatti's extraordinary explorations of the timbre of breathing combine with the ambient sounds of the performance space (and the traffic beyond it) to produce truly engrossing cinema for the ear, as vivid as Chris Watson's recordings of eviscerated zebra carcasses, as chillingly authentic as AMM's Crypt - and as natural as rain falling on a roof. (The Wire, Dan Warburton)