Ocelot Creates Spacious, Relentlessly Uneasy Improvisational Ambience

The new album by Ocelot – pianist Cat Toren, saxophonist Yuma Uesaka and drummer Colin Hinton – is streaming at Bandcamp. For the most part, this beast spends its time stalking its prey, not flexing its claws. The music is on the minimal side; much of it is still and sometimes rapturous, and when it gets aggressive, a central rhythm often disappears.  The repartee between the trio is thoughtfully conversational, and as usual Hinton is as much if not more of a colorist here as he is motive force.

The trio build the opening track, Daimon II, around an icy, looping series of simple stalactite piano licks in the upper righthand, echoed somberly in the lows, Hinton adding subtle shades on the perimeter as Uesaka provides hazy ambience. Factum, the second number, is a mini-suite. Hinton’s muted rustles on the toms contrasting with Uesaka’s airy, eerie microtonalities over Toren’s Rhodes loops to bookend the piece, with a dip into spare, mystical Japanese temple ambience, and then a triumphantly crashing, cascading tableau.

Likewise, in Iterations I, the band expand outward, upward, into the wild, and then back to tightly focused twin riffage from piano and sax. Hammering, hypnotic, Louis Andriessen-esque piledriver rhythms permeate the next track, Post, with a recurrent joke that’s too good to give away.

The sparse, crepuscular undersea landscape of Anemone slowly becomes more animated, with flitting presences crawling around Toren’s low lefthand murk and eventually, her broodingly circling modalities.

How much contempt is there in Contemptuality? Toren’s chilly, Messiaenic belltones give way to a solemn, dessicated quasi-stroll, Uesaka uneasily hanging overhead, Hinton further icing the scene with his glockenspiel and hardware. As a storm gains momentum, Toren circles soberly, Uesaka kicking up a modal frenzy, Hinton holding the center.

Chilly desolation reaches its vastest expanse here in the haunting, subtly crescendoing calls and responses of Sequestration. Toren’s sparse, Mompou-esque chiming melody and Uesaka’s guarded triumph over Hinton’s slow sway in the album’s concluding track, Crocus offer more than a hint of brighter days to come. May this be an omen for us all.

Advertisement