Ezra and Ernesto on guitars

Ezra Sturm & Ernesto Diaz-Infante — The Escape (Muteant Sounds, 2024)

Ernesto Diaz-Infante was one of my earliest encounters on the Bay Area music scene. I remember receiving his music at KZSU — contemplative solo piano albums like Itz’at initially, then guitar explorations like Wires and Wooden Boxes. (Follow those links to find them on Bandcamp.) He’s worked in groups often enough, but in my mind, his name ties to mostly solo work, especially long-form guitar explorations, sometimes soothing, sometimes rumbling.

Lately he’s performed in a duo with his son, Ezra Sturm. I’ve gotten to enjoy their live performances twice this year, and they’ve collaborated on an album, The Escape, featuring Sturm on electric guitar and Diaz-Infante mostly on acoustic.

A standard mode of conversation for them is for Diaz-Infante to create a percussive field — rapid picking or a hard-clipped strumming — against slower, fuzzed-out blasts from Sturm. They work within a language of sour tones, both electric and acoustic. Their improvisations often build a tangible rhythm, and they are not above riding the occasional groove. “Tears Before Chaos” opens with an electric guitar blare like a slow alarm, backing fodder for Diaz-Infante’s acoustic rustlings that spike into hyperkinetic mode, but it ends with Diaz-Infante strumming a cycle of chords with Sturm’s fuzzed-out electric joining in.

The closing track, “When the Clock Hits Midnight,” is another beast entirely, based on steady synth arpeggios against an atonal electric-guitar chime. Marjorie Sturm’s flute, subtly nestled against the synth sounds, alternates between sublime and ominous. The piece is dark on the surface, but by the end, it’s got a spring in its step.

Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Ezra Sturm, during their Day of Noise sound check

In March, I got to see Sturm and Diaz-Infante play a long-form improvisation at the Luggage Store Gallery, both on electric guitars. They opened a strong program that also included Pet the Tiger and the quartet of Darren Johnston (trumpet), Christina Braun (movement), Ivy Woods (double bass), and Rent Romus (sax).

Before that, Diaz-Infante and Sturm appeared on KZSU’s Day of Noise 2024, again both on electric. They were in an especially exploratory mood, wandering into ethereal territory that showed they continue finding new ground, six months after having recorded The Escape. We streamed Day of Noise to the KZSUlive channel on YouTube, meaning you can experience that performance right now.

Diaz-Infante is having a prolific year. Amor Celestial and For Jim Ryan both feature pairs of long-form works, the latter album having been performed in honor of the late saxophonist Jim Ryan. I’m hoping to write more about Jim (and that tribute album) soon.

Veals & Geeks

Back in June, we breezed through Brussels for one day, where — joy of joys! — I found a record store with an Improv section.

Source: Plattenläden

It’s called Veals & Geeks, and it is split among at least three storefronts clustered in the touristy Grand-Place neighborhood: a CD-focused store that looks like it was their original location; a nook with vinyl bins and some used CDs; and an outlet for audio gear. They don’t do online sales, steadfast in the belief that these stores can be community hubs for music lovers.

The Improv section, located in the first store, wasn’t large — maybe 20 or 30 items, huddled between Jazz and a special row just for Tzadik — but had clearly been curated by someone who knew what they were doing. Familiar names stood out, like Fred Lonberg-Holm and the sadly departed Peter Brötzmann. In a non-purist way, it included albums not purely improvised but appealing to the same listener base. I think that bin is where Dougie Bowne’s One Way Elevator lived, a disc that I’d heard of but never managed to find. (It’s a high-caliber trio: John Medeski, Fred Hopkins, and Bowne, doing Bowne’s compositions. A happy find.)

In hindsight, I wish I’d bought more. But it was early in our week-long trip to Europe, and I was worried about luggage space, and I was trying to budget myself. I decided to focus on names I was less familiar with (sorry, Fred and Peter). Back home, I spent lots of time with two albums in particular.

Delphine Dora, Bruno Duplant, Paulo Chagas — Onion Petals As Candle Light (Wild Silence, 2012).

This was too endearingly DIY to pass up, packaged in a square paper envelope with a swatch of glossy homemade-looking artwork taped to the front and a store-recommendation tag promising “trance improvisation.” Affixed to the back was a small label, the size of a fortune-cookie fortune, naming the artists and album. The CD face is blank white, no words, and the clerk apologized that he couldn’t guarantee it was the right one. I told him I was happy to take a chance. (It was indeed the correct disc, verifiable on Bandcamp.)

The aesthetic is gentle-rain quietude with a subtle edge. Delphine Dora‘s recordings elsewhere are patient mixes of piano (often prepared piano) with voice, field recordings, and loops. Here, she takes the same approach, leaving plenty of contemplative space while poking and stabbing confidently, often favoring melting-ice high registers. Chagas’ clarinet and flute outline the mood with languid lines. Duplant bows the bass delicately amid the fragile “To Cy Twombly” and adds sparse, confident plucking throughout “Mechanics of Dreams.”

Dora has an extensive catalogue of work on Bandcamp.

Move — Hyvinkää (Unisono, 2016)

Move is a working quintet helmed by Finnish saxophonist Harri Sjöström. I wanted to get at least one disc with a medium-sized group on it, as well as at least one long improvisation. Hyvinkää, named for the city it was performed in, fit both bills.

The 39-minute piece launches abruptly into a hovering phase, patient discovery befitting the nighttime colors on the album cover. Bells abound — the cool-spectrum chime of vibraphone (Emilio Gordoa), or small sparse pings (Dag Magnus Narvesen at the drum kit). Sjöström’s soprano sax darts against the unfolding backdrop and eventually feeds energy back into it.

The band is rounded out by Achim Kaufman (piano) and Adam Pultz Melbye (bass), both essential to fleshing out the sound and helping drive the action during the more heated phases. The band’s central mood-maker, though, is Gordoa’s vibraphone and its touch of nighttime charm. His unaccompanied solo is a nice treat.

Back home, I learned that Move had released a second CD. Naturally, I had to buy it in physical form to complete the matching set. Move in Moers feels more like a direct conversation; it dives into the chatter, rather than scene-setting. The atmosphere stays restrained, as on Hyvinkää, building up to a boil more than midway through. The conclusion is a satisfying slow surge, a moment of serendipity where the players agree: It’s time.

Visit Move’s website, and find Hyvinkää and Move in Moers on Bandcamp.

non-dweller: Scrapes, scribbles, resonance

gabby fluke-mogul, Jacob Felix Heule, & Kanoko Nishi-Smith — non-dweller (Humbler, 2021)

Two sets of strings and a bass drum: The configuration could be purely percussive, but non-dweller is built more around bowing and scraping, an ongoing chatter. The first of two long-form improvisations on this album starts with a choppy, nervous bustle, like beach crabs in full sprint, and later settles into buzzing and rattling vibrations.

It’s sometimes hard to tell which instrument is making which sound. gabby fluke-mogel‘s violin often stands out easily, tending toward squeaking microtones and extra-musical sounds pulled from the strings. Kanoko Nishi-Smith bows the koto for deep-register rumbling or clicks away like a tightly wound rubber band. Jacob Felix Heule‘s bass drum isn’t about dramatic concussions; he creates resonance in high tones or deep swoops. Just as the strings can play percussively, the drum becomes something of a stringed instrument.

Almost like a drone, the sounds blend into a mesmerizing haze. Unlike a drone, this music wiggles and contorts — there is an undercurrent of activity organized into episodes, like the inner workings of a vast, multi-staged machine.

You can preview the album on Bandcamp.

For a glimpse of the processes involved, here’s a snippet of fluke-mogel and Nishi-Smith performing in 2018 at Temescal Arts Center, Oakland:

House band: An improvisation in nine rooms

Phillip Greenlief — Bellingham for David Ireland (Edgetone, 2020)

This is a live recording of a “concert” — or, really, more a site-specific audio installation, a “happening.” In October 2017, saxophonist Phillip Greenlief and eight other musicians spread out among the rooms of 500 Capp Street — former residence of artist David Ireland, and now a nonprofit arts space — for an hour of improvised performance. As musicians read from Greenlief’s map-based graphical score, the audience was free to wander the two-story house, hearing different aspects of the sound depending which musicians were nearby or farther away. Every audience member experienced this show differently.

With the CD, you get yet another experience, one delivered by an omniscient narrator, combining the sounds of the nine rooms into one document. No musician and no attendee experienced the sounds the way they are on this recording. (The part of the narrator is played by engineer Phil Perkins, assisted by Sara Thompson; Greenlief had a hand in the mixing a well.)

What we get is an hour’s worth of spirited, reverent improvising, built up in response to the house itself and to the other musicians. Greenlief, positioned in the entryway at the foot of the stairs, had the most central vantage and could probably hear a little of everything. Other musicians caught glimpses of the whole based on what their neighbors were doing, and this chain of communication is what keeps the overall performance cohesive. “Players speculate and swap rumors,” Sam Lefebvre writes in his rich, immersive liner notes.

The mix preserves a sense of distance. I feel like I sometimes hear instruments that are pushed toward the foreground or background, although it’s also possible they were simply playing loudly or quietly. The performance begins with slow, hovering sounds, almost giving the impression of a haunted house. Many sounds aren’t immediately identifiable, considering the amount of extended playing involved, the two electronics musicians included, and Aurora Josephson’s ghostly wordless vocals. The piece builds up a restless energy, often through percussive rustling and the occasional starburst of electronics. But there are also mindful, meditative passages, like the brief violin soliloquy by Gabby Fluke-Mogul at around the 48-minute mark. These are chances for everyone to breathe and, I would imagine, to drink in the atmosphere of the house itself.

We can’t relive the whole experience of the performance — the physical sense of exploration, the dim nighttime lighting, the wood of the stairways and doors. The CD booklet’s photos, by Pamela Z, drop some compelling hints. Still, I’m glad that a document of this special event exists, so the stragglers like me can imagine walking through that house on that evening.

The album is a spiritual successor to Phillip Greenlief Solo at 500 Capp Street (2019), a limited-edition, vinyl-only release in which Greenlief wandered the house alone, improvising in reaction to the spaces he encountered.

Aram Shelton’s Resounder

Aram Shelton, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Frank Rosaly — Resounder (Singlespeed, 2015)

Resounder is a bustling trio improv session with electronic enhancements added by saxophonist Aram Shelton after-the-fact. But the effect can be subtle. In fact, the players are so adept at wringing sounds from their instruments that you have to wonder if some of the exotic sounds are coming from the original session.

I say that because I first listened to Resounder blind, not knowing about Shelton’s post-processing. Once I knew it was there, my ears started playing tricks on me, particularly on “Bring Focus.” That buzzing tinge in the sax — is it acoustic or electronic? Did the sax just echo a few notes artificially, or was that my imagination? Now there, that was definitely a sax looped back into the mix … you get the idea.

“Fading Memory,” with Fred Lonberg-Holm‘s cello altered to spit ribbons of metal — that’s a more obvious example. Drummer Frank Rosaly gets his turns too, I think. One segment (which I now can’t find) has his toms and bass drum melted together into a low-flying tonal hum. Or was that just my imagination again?

Some of the electronics are more overt, which is good fun. Longberg-Holm gets plenty of electronics treatment to create dull roars and guitar-hero antics. There’s a passage later on “Bring Focus” that’s a long ramp to a crescendo, a nice slow burn of rumbling with a buzzy edge to the cello. And when it’s done, the band drops out, leaving behind a tinny sine wave — it’s a good dramatic moment.

Shelton had planned this to be a regular trio recording, just three good friends getting together in Chicago, and they turned in a crackling set. It’s only afterward that Shelton started considering enhancing the sounds, and it adds depth to what was already a densely packed session. Sometimes there’s some playback that literally adds another voice to the group. More often, though, it just sounds like more than three people, as Shelton’s processing creates new surfaces for the ear to cling to.

Listen to an excerpt of “Hope of Symbioses” on YouTube:

… Or to “Fading Memory” on Soundcloud:

Double Dose of Frith

Fred Frith and Barry Guy — Backscatter Bright Blue (Intakt, 2015)
Lotte Anker and Fred Frith — Edge of the Light (Intakt, 2015)

Listening to these sets of duo improvisation, I was struck by how often Fred Frith plays the role of background instigator, putting colors and scrim behind his partner. This makes sense — Frith, in both cases, is the one with the rhythm instrument and the electronic gizmos. He’s got more options for painting the scenery.

Of course, I’m generalizing; Frith often takes a front-line role too. And in general, duo sessions such as these are meant to be meetings of equals.

But alongside Lotte Anker (sax) on Edge of the Light, Frith often does feel like the one focusing on the shading and toning to craft the mood behind Anker’s aggressive, choppy style. It’s easy for a listener’s ear to gravitate toward Anker’s sax as the “lead” line, as on the short “Non-Precision Approach Procedure,” where she carves crooked trails accompanied by Frith in noisemaker mode, rattling and bashing.

 
She and Frith seem more balanced on “Run Don’t Hide,” where Anker and Frith combine to create a sustained buzzing tension. “Anchor Point” even has Frith doing some traditional strumming, albeit to an irregular rhythm, coaxing Anker’s solo forward into faster and buoyant territory.

The Ankur album ends with “Hallucinating Angels,” a high-stress shimmer where Frith is laying down ghostly waves against Anker’s slow, jagged tones on sax. It’s an unsettling faux peacefulness that builds into a slowly maddening chatter.

 
As you’d expect, Backscatter Bright Blue has a different sound, a strings-on-strings tussle where the “nearness” of the instruments — the fact that they’re close relatives — makes for a more equitable pairing. As with Edge of the Light, the sound aims for cragged improvisation, with Guy’s bass often voicing a percussive crunch or high-strung bowed tones. I still sometimes feel as if Guy is doing the “main” solo with Frith adding the depth and color, but their sounds intertwine substantially.

The combination of effects, guitar loops, and extended playing sometimes make it hard to tell who’s doing what. Here’s a patch of “Moments of Many Lives” where Frith takes a lead voice, but overall, you can hear the roles blending into one another.

 
“Moments” is one of two epic, roughly 20-minute constructions on Backscatter Bright Blue. Later on, it includes a passage where Fright and Guy combine in a manic, minimalist babble. The piece culminates in stacks of chattering guitar loops with Guy’s fierce bowing and Frith’s guitar hammering soaring overhead.

“Where the Cities Gleam in Darkness” is a fascinating study in, well, darkness: Guy goes into attack mode with thumping, clattering bass made more abrasive by Frith’s guitar treatments. Later, Guy uses the bow for a slower but equally dark passage backed by crunching, desolate guitar effects.

Finally, there’s a special place in my heart of “The Circus Is a Song of Praise,” which enters as a mutually destructive jackhammering but ends with this faux-music-box chiming and an eerie aftertaste.

 

Fred Frith Warms Up a New Trio

Glenn, Frith, and Hoopes. Source: jasonhoopes.com.

Fred Frith‘s new trio will be touring around Europe late in February. As a prelude, they’ve played a couple of shows here in the Bay Area, including one at Slim’s that I got to see recently.

It’s a long-form improvising trio — you could certainly call it a power trio — with Jason Hoopes on bass and Jordan Glenn on drums. Electronics and loops help the bass and guitar build a screen of lingering sound, often dark and heavy. Listening to Hoopes in the band Eat the Sun was good preparation, actually.

In front of that curtain of sound, each player adds virtuosity to color the piece. The first of three long pieces they played started with a blast zone created by Frith and especially Hoopes, who was sawing away at one high note on the bass. That put Glenn in the spotlight quickly, with fluid drum rolls and high-precision hammering.

Hoopes stayed in a supporting role for a long while before finally taking a lead voice with a thick, bubbling stew of bass soloing. Hoopes is terrific on electric bass, and it’s always a treat to hear him really cut loose. This trio offers him a lot of space to do that, although you get the sense that he directs more energy toward shaping the overall sound.

Hoopes, Glenn, Frith

Of course, Frith contributed too, with many of his usual tools, such as bows and other implements against the guitar strings. Recently, I was reading a critic raving about Frith’s detuning of the guitar during solos — about how he was able to make that “wrong” sound fit just right. I hadn’t thought about that too much, but as Frith untuned his low E string during one span, it struck me that it really was just right and in “tune” with the logic of what he was doing. Frith added a lot of conventional playing as well — crisp and chirpy sounds harkening back to his prog days.

It was a terrific set, although I have to admit I lost the thread at times. The drone or roar of the guitar and bass sometimes overwhelmed the sound for me; there was always something going on underneath it, but sometimes my mind had trouble penetrating that roar. That’s not always a bad thing (“drone” is a legitimate musical form, and this was certainly not a sleepy drone) but I could have used some more dividers in the music. It’s possible I was just too worn out on a Thursday night.

Frith’s choice of bandmates is significant. Like Art Blakey, he’s teaming up with younger musicians to infuse fresh ideas into his music. Glenn and Hoopes are part of a wave of accomplished artists he’s inspired while teaching at Mills College, where he was a mentor not only for improvisers but for songwriters pursuing thoughtful, complex pop/prog ideas — Jack o’ the Clock, the local band I’ve been raving about, being a prime example. (They opened the Slim’s show, but I didn’t make it to the city in time for their set, alas.)

The Frith Trio is going to spend a lot of time in Central/Eastern Europe (Germany, Austria, Hungary) with stops in Belgium and the Netherlands. It’s a good chance to see Frith, of course, but also to check out some of the strong talent the Bay Area has been nurturing. Here’s the tour schedule, as found on Hoopes‘ and Frith‘s web sites:

Feb. 19 — Zagreb, Croatia
Feb. 20 — Göppingen, Germany
Feb. 21— Vienna, Austria
Feb. 22 — Budapest, Hungary
Feb. 23 — Bolzano, Italy
Feb. 24 — Middelburg, Netherlands
Feb. 25 — Brussels, Belgium
Feb. 26 — Konstanz, Germany
Feb. 27 — Berlin, Germany
Feb. 28 — Dortmund, Germany
March 1 — Wels, Austria

Grosse Abfahrt, 2013 Version

The Facebook page for improv group Grosse Abfahrt is a hoot. It’s full of fun and frivolous stuff, lots of dirigible/zeppelin-related news (because…. yeah, I have no idea), and updates related to Tuesday’s upcoming concert: June 25, with guests Alfred 23 Harth and Torsten Muller (sax and bass, respectively) at the Center for New Music in San Francisco.

Taking advantage of YouTube, they’ve inserted some videos showing what those two guys can do.  Rather than re-embed those here, I’ll just add some audio at the bottom of the post.

I haven’t written about Grosse Abfahrt in a couple of years. The name translates to “great departure,” and one reader told me it can be interpreted as “great difficulty” (as in a double-black-diamond ski slope). It’s a core group of five musicians that adds guests, often two from outside North America in most cases, to produce one big improvising collective. (Harth lives in South Korea and Muller in Vancouver, and they’re both German-born.)

The aesthetic is one of “lower-case” sound spaces: lots of curled, crinkly sounds and a careful respect for silences. Usually. Being an improv group, they can go in any direction they want.

Here’s the lineup for Tuesday:

• Core group —
  • Tom Djll (trumpet)
  • Matt Ingalls (clarinet)
  • John Shiurba (guitar)
  • Tim Perkis (electronics, participating via Internet)
  • Gino Robair (electronics, percussion, whatever)
• Local guests —
  • Dana Jessen (bassoon)
  • Polly Moller (flute)
  • Kyle Bruckmann (oboe)
• International guests —
  • Torsten Muller (bass)
  • Alfred Harth (sax)

Side note: If you’re in L.A., Harth and Muller will be down there July 1, performing at the Blue Whale in a trio with drummer Ted Byrnes.

Now, regarding things-these-guys-can-do…

… Here’s Muller in duet with Ronit Kirchman (violin) in Los Angeles. They also have a duo album out: An Idea to Farewell (Wild River, 2013). Click this link or the image to the right.

… Here’s Harth in an improv-jazz setting, a trio with Wilbur Morris (bass) and Kevin Norton (drums/vibes), taken from the album Waxwingweb@ebroadway (Clean Feed, 2001).  First, from the piece “Interstice,” a quieter burble that’s more in the Grosse Abfahrt style:

… And, just for fun, Harth in that same piece, going for big sound and an Ayler-like crescendo:

… Finally, here’s a sample of a then-unreleased 2009 Grosse Abfahrt session provided to KZSU by Tom Djll. I posted another snippet from that session previously, but this one’s better; it streteches for a few minutes to demonstrate the ebb and flow of the music. Guests include Frank Gratkowski on clarinet. Oh, and don’t turn the volume up too much; it does get louder.

Passages: Rules of the Road

Didier Petit & Alexandre Pierrepont — Passages: A Road Record (Rogue Art, 2012)

Here’s an interesting exercise in turning process into a nearly tangible contributor to the art. Cellist Didier Petit teamed up with prominent North American musicians (Marilyn Crispell, Joe Morris, Hamid Drake, Larry Ochs….) in duos and trios, improvising to the sounds of a poem that we don’t get to hear (with the exception of one short passage).

So, Alexandre Pierrepont’s poem, Le Jardin des Cranes, is reduced to context, like the walls or the weather. It’s the backbone of the entire album, but it’s invisible.

Everything about Passages is a discovery, starting with the packaging: It looks like a typical Rogue Art softpack until you tear the plastic off and realize you’re holding a 48-page booklet. The CD itself blends many of the music tracks together, often with an interstitial sound from Petit and Pierrepont’s travels (airplanes, street crowds, etc.) — creating a subtly shifting tableau, like a long drive where you suddenly realize the scenery has changed. The music, excerpted from thirteen studio sessions, is a mix of lyrical moods and aggressive sparring.

Here’s how it worked. For each session, a selection of the poem was chosen and translated to English. The guest musician(s) and Petit got acquainted, warmed up a little, then improvised — with the poem segment read into their ears multiple times, first by Pierrepont, then by an non-French guest (William Parker being one example) who would read the French passage phonetically. The CD takes a few minutes from each session, with any part of the musical exercise being fair game.

I love the intangible sense that the process is a major component of the art. What’s being presented is not just the music, but also its surroundings.

It’s the same feeling I get from the “Drawing Restraint” series of works by artist Matthew Barney. Not the movie with Björk in it, but the actual drawings that were the earliest stages of the project. He’d set up some ridiculous physical constraint, such as swinging from the ceiling of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and draw. The MOMA example produced pencil drawings on a piece of paper attached to a wall; Barney had to swing over, draw, then swing back. The drawings themselves are a wreck, as you might imagine, and quite uninformative. It’s the whole process that gives the project the sheen of art.

(This reminds me that I’ve never written up Jean Derome’s album, Le Magasin Du Tissu, a fun application of random processes.) (UPDATE: Finally did it.)

The music is not a wreck. It’s very good. There’s even a trajectory: It starts in stern tones with Andrea Parkins and Gerald Cleaver, followed by Chicago sessions that are quite sublime, such as the gentle, jazzy groove of Nicole Mitchell’s flute backed by Petit’s cello and singing. His piece with drummers Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang is like an ominous little tribal dance, full of tension and rhythm, topped off by some gruff vocal howling by Petit.

François Houle, on clarinet, gets to represent Canada during the L.A. sessions. He’s got an extended dialogue with Petit that floats from lyrical tones to a choppy call-and-response. Bay Area hero Larry Ochs closes out the album with a session that includes the one time we get to hear the poem.

The booklet is more than liner notes; it’s a template and a road journal. It includes a poetic textual “map” of the 13 studio sessions, the entirety of Pierrepont’s poem, and an explanation of the whole project, written by Yves Citton. And photos, of course, taken during Petit and Pierrepont’s sojourn from Woodstock to New York City to Chicago to Los Angeles.

Passages is a wonderful pack of surprises and a good argument as to why the CD can still have a place in the digital world.

Four-Way Musical Crash

Ron Anderson, Robert L. Pepper, David Tamura, Philippe Petit — Closed Encounters of the 4 Minds (Public Eyesore, 2012)

Here’s a frenetic mix of noise and rock and improv, a constant tumbling of sounds, with lots of grating (in a good way) electronics providing a basslike backdrop.

It’s musical dodgeball, a bombardment that starts early in the first track: incoming sci-fi volleys and the fast tremor of Ron Anderson’s guitar. David Tamura’s sax blazes and squeaks with high lung power.

It’s the sax and the guitars spike the energy levels (you might be familiar with Anderson’s frenetic tendencies from The Molecules or PAK) and provide a semblance of rhythm. But don’t picture metal or ferocious speed-punk. In fact, there’s a cross between wildness and musicality in here. Crazy sax or guitar scribblings in one moment, a near-pleasant melodicism (backed by the same crazed, pulsing attitude) in the next.

Even a relatively calmer track like number 5 (they’re all untitled), with its zoned-out buzzing like a synthetic sitar, has the disquiet of David Tamura’s cranky sax and some ominous guitar electronics.

The album is often like a conversation where everybody wants to be heard at once, and in many contexts, that wouldn’t be a good thing. But you have to consider the intent. This music aims to be dynamic and aggressive — they fill the page with scribbles — and I love the bustling chaos it creates. It works.

That said, some points are a bit much. I’m torn as to whether I enjoy Track 4. It’s got an alarm-blare sound that just goes and goes and goes. Some days, I can take it as part of the scenery. Other days, I’m ready to reach through the speakers and rip out somebody’s laptop battery to end the pain. The loops of saxophones and of a keyboard-like sound (as on The Who’s “Eminence Front” — it might be the electric psalterion (harp) played by Petit) can feel either nicely juxtaposed or relentlessly annoying, depending on my mood.

But on most tracks, I enjoy the musical assault, and I like the structures they’ve built with the music. The 10-minute finale (track 8) progresses through phases that could each be described as a descent into madness. One segment has the feeling of shooting down a tunnel, with a pulsing fuzz in the bass spectrum representing the walls speeding past, until it disintegrates into a crunchy, staticky sound bed for the other instruments. It finally gives way to a rhythmic guitar chop that sets up the noisy ending.

Samples:

The first moments of the album:

Track 5. Zoned-out buzzing that’s still not peaceable:

Track 4, with that alarm blare. You decide:

The “tunnel” from track 8: