Each Tuesday, FADER editor Matthew Schnipper highlights an underappreciated recent release he thinks we need to know about. This week it’s William Parker and Hamid Drake’s Summer Snow. Listen to “Sky” from the album below, buy Summer Snow here and read about it after the jump.

Synchronized diving is so pretty. I did not know it existed until Sunday evening, when Guo Jingjing won her twenty billionth Olympic medal, along with her current partner Wu Minxia. The sport should be renamed perfect diving partners who practice together to get exactness. It seems impossible that two people could not only individually be so graceful, but that they could be equally and identically graceful with a partner. I love it. I guess there is something about perfection that is undeniable.

I used to listen to a lot of improvised music, mostly jazz, and perfection was the opposite, or maybe the inverse, of what the musicians were attempting. But that had to be because perfection wasn’t something that exists. This recording of William Parker (on doson’ngoni, shakuhachi, dumbek, talking drum, water bowls and bass) and Hamid Drake (on tabla, frame drum, gongs and drums) is entire improvised and occasionally not good. I don’t even feel as though they would disagree with me on quality judgments—both have enough recordings to illuminate for themselves their various self-bests. But there is a loose wobble throughout most of the songs here that makes that impatience for perfection a virtue, not just a hurried need for production and results. “Sky,” the second song, begins with Parker strumming the bass like a thick guitar for just a few seconds before he slows down and picks strings individually, little acoustic bursts. Drake is using taut hand drums for a tinkling pitter. Everything sounds organic, some things sound like mistakes. They pick up speed and simultaneously play off each other and then like the other is nowhere near. Four minutes in is a slow paced trot, Parker leading with somber bass. It sounds almost amateur, something entirely untrue of both men. But that soft exploration makes it alive.

Even though Guo Jingjing won the gold medal there were imperfections in her routine with Wu Minxia. I didn’t notice them, but when the camera moved overhead and the telecaster announced them you could see slight variations in form, Wu Minxia’s over rotation and slightly loose limb. They didn’t score only perfect tens. To me, they could have, my novice eye would have showered them all in gold medals, they achieved what is not only unthinkable to my common mind, but completely ridiculous. Who would imagine such an unobtainable goal like dual diving perfection? Can silver really rightfully be awarded to the team with one member whose knee bends just that much more left? Is this a life? And what would William Parker and Hamid Drake say? Would they admire the beauty or curse the futility? Maybe they’d say that sometimes the two are the same thing.