With drums and percussion courtesy of Aaron Moore (Volcano the Bear), this collaboration is a purely absurd, Dadaist outburst of jazz influenced noise. With cluster bomb percussion that rivals Peter Brotzmann's most chaotic compositions, violin abuse, and spastic turntable-ism, this is two sidelong tracks of noise that resembles very little else, which is probably a good thing for the world.
"The Beginning of the End" opens with high pitched shrieks and rattling percussion, which alternates between quiet passages and spastic turntable scrapes and drums that sound like they’re being thrown down a flight of stairs. The violin appears here and there, mostly in the form of strings being aggressively plucked and pulled. The mix has moments where it slows down and allows some breathing room before turning up the junkyard orchestra again. The dynamics closely mirror what is generally known as free jazz, with its restrained and wide open bits and contrasting blasts of pure chaos. It goes from harsh to absurd pretty quickly, with the turntable spitting out hyperspeed cartoon voices and electronic burbles. When the closing moments arrive, the violin and drums become disturbingly conventional, leaving me expecting another outburst at any time.
The second half of the album is "The End of the Beginning," and it isn’t far out of league from what was heard earlier. Opening with excessive violin torture and percussion like a bouncing rubber ball, there eventually arises a basic tom-tom drum beat that mimics the tension of the Jaws theme, with chaotic outbursts always around the corner. The contrasting random sound outbursts give it more a cartoon like quality though, rather than the pure darkness that could otherwise be there.
The middle maintains the jazz elements that were on the first piece, contrasting the calmer moments with machine gun beats and fragments of music that somehow manage to slip through the explosions. The jazz drumming and overdriven noise continues all the way through the end, where the electronic stuff crosses over into dead on harsh territory, and percussion blasts continue into the final moments.
This disc is definitely rooted in the free jazz tradition structurally, but the traditional horns and strings of the genre are supplanted by the everything–including-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation. At times its almost tiring though, and unlike a harsh noise record, the dynamics here vary so much that the transitions can be almost too jarring. With a tempo and dynamic that could be the audio equivalent of crystal meth, it probably shouldn’t be listened to before bedtime.
samples:
Read More
