We will never know whether Bartók and Moondog bumped into one another in the 1940s on the streets of New York, but on this album Csaba Palotaï and Steve Argüelles give them a chance to meet. What we hear are studies for Bartók’s Mikrokosmos in the spirit of Moondog’s musical simplicity, on acoustic guitar and a percussion set consisting of objets trouvés, in such a way that a special harmony comes into being between desert blues, Hungarian and Balkan folk music, twentieth-century minimalism and contemporary light music.

The expression Cabane Perchée means treehouse. For Csaba Palotaï, a guitarist who lives and works in France, this word gave the starting point for a new duo album with his old music partner, the Brit Steve Argüelles. For them, the treehouse is a symbol showing that ‘an infinitely simple picture can contain everything of an infinitely complex world’. When they put this into music, they try with the simplest means possible to invoke the musical memories of listeners accustomed to complex forms. The vertical pillars of the treehouse are provided by the pieces of Bartók’s piano cycle Mikrokosmos: Csaba extended his polyphonic guitar technique to be able to improvise to these two-voice works. The horizontal elements of the musical construct are given by the music of Moondog, who created New York urban folk music, putting together a percussion set from objets trouvés, perhaps not suspecting that in doing so he was treading out a new path for modern repetitive music. Steve draws inspiration from him as he selects elements for the percussion set for this album from his bathroom, an antiques dealer, the forest, and an instrument shop. And what is the ladder leading up to the treehouse? Repetition, groove, a profane but all the more effective a means for attaining a higher plane of consciousness. This is the music-making den these two exceptional musicians invite us into, replete with panorama and all mod cons, yet still with a romantic and handcrafted feel.