Another Relentlessly Haunting Album and an Alphabet City Gig by Guitarist Gordon Grdina

Even by his own high-voltage standards, fiery jazz oudist/guitarist Gordon Grdina has really been on a roll making albums lately. Edjeha, with his Middle Eastern jazz quartet Marrow might well be one of the half-dozen best albums released this year. His other new one, Inroads, with his quartet of reedman Oscar Noriega, pianist Russ Lossing and percussionist Satoshi Takeishi blends haunting Middle Eastern chromatics with savage improvisation and even detours into snarling doom metal and Lynchian cinematics. This is deep, dark music. Their next gig is Nov 26 at 9 PM at the old Nublu on Ave. C; cover is $10.

The album – streaming at Bandcamp – kicks off with a haunting, spaciously Satie-esque rainy-day piano tableau cruelly titled Giggles. The band follow with the album’s most epic track, Not Sure, opening with frenetic, polyrhythmic variations on a Balkan-tinged theme, disintegrating for a bit and then regrouping with a savage late 70s King Crimson focus and more of a Middle Eastern attack. Lingering psychedelic pulses give way to a brisk, twisted stroll that isn’t Britfolk or Egyptian but alludes to each of those worlds. From there the band scamper and then memorably blast their way out.

P.B.S., another epic, beginns with interchanges of creepy Rhodes and more stern acoustic piano, Grdina and Noriega – on alto sax – playing the morose central theme in tandem. A marionettish theme develops; Noriega’s microtonal, allusive circling beyond an increasingly tense center is pure genius. Deep-space oxygen bubbles escape the Sun Ra craft as solar flares loom ever closer, then sear the scenery:.Grdina’s merciless, resonant attack is breathtakingly evil.

Semantics is a brooding, morosely wafting duet for echoey, spare guitar and ghostly sax. The next epic, clocking in at practically ten minutes, is Fragments, the bandleader’s spare, spacious oud intro echoed by Lossing’s inside-the-piano flickers and muted rustles. The two develop a phantasmagorical catacomb stroll; then each band member takes a separate elegaic tour, only to reconvene with a frenetic hope against hope. Noriega’s looming foghorn solo at the end is another gloomy highlight.

The desolately crescendoing guitar/sax tableau Casper brings to mind Bill Frisell at his most disconsolate, or Todd Neufeld’s whispery work with trombonist Samuel Blaser. Kite Fight, a squirrelly and then assaultive Grdina/Noiriega duet introduces the album’s final epic, Apokalympic, Noriega eventually wafting in to join Grdina’s expansive postbop chordal guitar phrasing. Lossing’s arrival signals a turn toward franticness and terror, fueled by a scorching guitar/sax duel. The marionettish Macedonian psychedelic outro is irresistibly twisted. 

The group close with a Lynchian reprise of Giggles, Grdina’s angst-fixated, starry reverb guitar paired with Lossing’s close-to-the-vest, wounded neoromanticisms. Looks like Grdina has not one but two albums on the best of 2018 list here.

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Thumbscrew Make Haunting, Thorny Music, and Play a Week at the Vanguard Starting July 17

The album cover shot for the first of Thumbscrew’s two simultaneous new releases, Ours, shows bassist Michael Formanek, guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara standing motionless, backs to a wall, each holding a cactus. The two guys manage to half-conceal their grins, but Halvorson can’t. Does this ridiculous symbolism mean that they’re having a lot of fun playing thorny music? Hmmmmm……

The folks at the Vanguard, where the trio will be playing at 8:30 and 10 starting on July 17, seem to agree. You should see what they put on their calendar page: essentially, “This band won’t torture you, so if you like sounds that are just a wee, wee bit outside, come see them.” Halvorson – who’s finally getting the critical props she’s deserved for the past decade – has played there several times in the past, but this is the collaborative trio’s debut there.

The album – streaming at Cuneiform Records – opens with the aptly titled Snarling Joys, a furtively strolling, eerie quasi-bolero and a dead ringer for Big Lazy. Halvorson’s spidery noir evokes Steve Ulrich and Formanek’s deadpan, methodical basslines bring to mind Andrew Hall while Fujiwara finally abandons the racewalk for the shadows. It’s one of the best songs Halvorson has ever written.

Fujiwara’s Saturn Way has more spacious if similarly eerie chromatics set against a hypnotically circling web of polyrhythms, decaying to a sepulchrally flickering tableau, Halvorson’s funereal belltones hanging overhead. Formanek’s Cruel Heartless Bastards bookends a a dissociative round robin with grimly insistent waves of late 70s King Crimson, Halvorson painting a vast, echoey grayscale as Fujiwara tumbles and crashes

Smoketree, another Halvorson tune, alternates three themes. The trio open with spare, moody pastoral jazz, Formanek pulling the band into stalking King Crimson territory again before Halvorson hits her pedal for warpy, watery weirdness. Thumbprint, also by Halvorson, could be Gabor Szabo covering a Monk swing tune with an sardonically evil rhythm section: her wry quotes and space lounge sonics build contrast over Formanek’s loopy hooks and Fujiwara’s shifty shuffles.

The first of two consecutive Fujiwara tunes, One Day gives Halvorson a misty backdrop for desolate, spacious phrasing but also some hilarious, thinly cached quotes, Formanek adding simmering and then punchy melody when not harmonizing uneasily with the guitar. The second, Rising Snow wafts sparely and morosely toward waltz territory until Fujiwara hits some steady but impossible-to-figure syncopation – this also could be Big Lazy.

The album concludes with two Formanek numbers. The first is titled Words That Rhyme With Spangle (angle bangle dangle jangle mangel mangle strangle tangle wangle wrangle). It veers away from catchy, circular chromatic riffs as the rhythm falls away to a drifting wildfire, and then makes a slight return. Unconditional, the final cut, is a funhouse mirror version of a balmy ballad, lowlit by Halvorson’s distantly menacing tremolo-picking and Fujiwara’s cymbal drizzle.

Interplay and Halvorson’s usual sense of humor notwithstanding, this a pretty dark record – and it might be the best album of 2018. And there’s a companion release, Theirs, a covers collection. Watch this space for more about that one before the Vanguard stand starts.

Drummer Kate Gentile’s Formidable Band Headlines At the Silent Barn on October 3

Why are so many of the best jazz albums made by bands led by drummers? Because they have the deepest address books: everybody wants to play with the good ones. Kate Gentile is the latest to keep this hallowed tradition going – her darkly vivid, intensely focused new album Mannequins is streaming at Bandcamp. She has an album release show coming up on a weird but excellently eclectic bill on Oct 3 at 11 PM at the Silent Barn. Art-rocker Martin Bisi – who may do his vortical morass of guitar loops at this one – opens the night at 8, followed by the album release show by assaultive shredmeister Brandon Seabrook‘s Needle Drive and then math-shred duo Bangladeafy. Cover is a measly $8.

As you would expect from a multi-percussionist – she also plays vibraphone here -, her compositions are very diversely rhythmic. The album is a jazz sonata of sorts, variations on a series of cell-like themes, interspersed with miniatures, some of them pretty funny. Matt Mitchell’s distorted synth fuels the staggeringly syncopated opening track, Stars Covered in Clouds of Metal – it comes across as super-syncopated late 70s King Crimson and quickly disintegrates.

Jeremy Viner’s tenor sax and Mitchell’s piano team with the drums for a sardonically blithe theme as Trapezoidal Nirvana pounces along like a Pac Man on acid, Gentile and Adam Hopkins’ bass anchoring a blippy piano solo as the rhythm slowly falls away. The starscape midway through, Gentile going for a noir bongo feel with her rims and hardware as Mitchell sparkles eerily and Viner wafts uneasily, is especially tasty. Again, King Crimson comes to mind, especially as the crescendo builds. 

Unreasonable Optimism pairs unsettlingly syncopted piano, vibes and sax, Gentile entering to provide some welcome ballast and gravitas. Mitchell’s creepy, Mompou-esque belltone piano takes centerstage as bass and drums prowl the perimeter diligently and then drop down to sepulchral wisps along with the sax.

The sardonically titled miniature Hammergaze evokes Kenny Wollesen’s gamelanesque explorations. Otto, on Alien Shoulders revisits the album’s tricky metrics, but more playfully, with squirrelly piano and squiggly electronics. The group follows the aptly and amusingy titled Xenormorphic with Wrack, bustling with animated sax and spiraling piano, the closest thing to mainstream postbop swing here. Then they run the knotty cells of Cardiac Logic.

Rattletrap drums, squalling and then furtive sax make way for deep-sky piano and vibes, then conjoin in the brief diptych Full Lucid. Likewise, the portentous atmospherics of Sear cede the path to the uneasily Messianic piano/sax lattices, steadily cascading variations and wry birdhouse tableau of Micronesia Parakeet.

The album winds up with two massive epics. Alchemy Melt [With Tilt] has a broodingly altered boogie interspersed within jauntily flickering interludes and more of those moodily bubbling cells, punctuated by a long, squiggly Viner solo. Does SSGF neatly synopsize everything? More or less, with stately/exploratory piano dichotomies, a brief bass solo, percolating sax and Gentile’s subtle wit. It ends distinctly unresolved. If you want entertainment and intensity, the album has plenty of both.

Brandon Seabrook Will See You on the Dark Side of the Drum

Brandon Seabrook is one of New York’s great musical individualists. He made his name as a shredder – anybody who’s witnessed his neutron-beam attack on guitar or banjo can vouch for how accurately the bandname Seabrook Power Plant reflects his sound. Yet anyone who’s ever seen him play guitar in magically nuanced singer Eva Salina’s electric Balkan group knows how gorgeously lyrical and restrained his playing can be. Seabrook’s latest album, Die Trommel Fatale, is streaming at Bandcamp . As drummer Dave Treut, who’s played with Seabrook for longer than most anyone else, observed over drinks the other night at Barbes, it pretty well capsulizes Seabrook’s career so far.  He’s likely to become the loudest, most assaultive guitarist ever to play Joe’s Pub when he and the band show up for the album release show this June 8 at  9:30 PM. Cover is $15.

The premise of the album is what can happen when you anchor the music with two drummers, without cymbals. The result turns out to be less funereal than simply monstrous. Treut and Sam Ospovat rumble and crush behind those stripped-down kits, with Marika Hughes on cello, Eivind Opsvik on bass and Chuck Bettis doing the Odin deathmetal thing on the mic.

The album opens with Emotional Cleavage, which could be very sad or completely the opposite, depending on how you interpret the title. This one’s a mashup of free jazz, death metal and 70s King Crimson: squirrelly franticness side by side with lingering, Messianic unease. Clangorous Vistas begin with a wry car horn allusion, a high drone, then sudden insectile scampering into a dancing skronk that eventually catapults Seabrook into one of his usual feral, tremolo-picked assaults

Jungly electronics, eerily resonant jangle and warped, machinegunning squall alternate throughout Abccessed Pettifogger (gotta love those titles, huh?) Shamans Never R.S.V.P. is a real creeper, waves of stark strings underpinning Seabrook’s elegantly skeletal, upper-register stroll: it sounds like Hildegarde von Bingen on acid, and it’s one of the few places on the album where the percussion gets as ominous as the rest of the band. And then everybody goes skronking and squalling, with a tumbling duel between Treut and Ospovat. From there, the similarly shrieky Litany of Turncoats makes a good segue.

The Greatest Bile, a diptych, builds out of crackling, circling riffage to the most twisted march released this year, Seabrook radiating evil Keith Levene-esque overtones when he’s not torturing the strings with volley after volley of tremolo-picking. Opsvik’s calmly pulsing solo, and then Hughes’ far more grim one, reach down for something approaching a respite from the firestorm. The second part is just as dirty if a little less unhinged, like a drony Martin Bisi noisescape with the strings and drums hovering on the periphery. 

The sandy-paintbrush drum brushing of the atmospheric Rhizomatic comes as a welcome surprise, then the band goes back to Quickstep Grotesquerie (the next number, which would be an apt secondary album title). The final cut is a chaotic, cauldron sarcastically titled Beautiful Flowers. This isn’t exactly easy listening, but in its own extremely twisted way, it’s a party in a box. Lights out on the floor with headphones on! 

The Cellar & Point Bring Their Intriguingly Kinetic Postrock Sounds to Glasslands

A project originated by guitarist Chris Botta and drummer Joe Branciforte, the Cellar & Point are sort of Claudia Quintet meets Sleepmakeswaves meets Wounded Buffalo Theory. Mantra Percussion‘s Joe Bergen plays vibraphone, immediately drawing the Claudia Quintet comparison, which is further fueled by the nimble string work of violinist Chistopher Otto and cellist Kevin McFarland, who comprise one-half of the adventurous Jack Quartet. Guitarist Terrence McManus and bassist Rufus Philpot round out the band. The backstory – Botta and Branciforte as teenage buds in New Jersey, hanging out and blasting Rage Against the Machine – makes sense in context. Their debut long-player, Ambit, is just out from the folks at Cuneiform who have it up along with the rest of their vast catalog on bandcamp. The Cellar & Point are playing the album release show on a killer triplebill at Glasslands on Nov 19 starting around 9 with epically sweeping art-rock chorale the Knells and the alternately hypnotic and kinetic Empyrean Atlas. Cover is ten bucks; it’s not clear what the order of bands is but they’re all worth seeing.

The album’s opening track, 0852 is characteristic: tricky prog-rock metrics drive lush ambience with lingering vibraphone, slide guitar (and maybe ebow) and some artfully processsed pizzicato from the string section that adds almost banjo-like textures. Arc builds out of swirly atmospherics to a matter-of-fact march and then an animatedly cyclical dance with tinges of both west African folk music and King Crimson.

There are two Tabletops here, A and B. The first juxtaposes and mingles lingering vibes, stadium guitar bombast and lithely dancing strings. The second layers rainy-day vibes and strings with terse Andy Summers-ish guitar. There are also two White Cylinders: number one being a seemingly tongue-in-cheek mashup of brash jazz guitar, vividly prickly mystery movie textures and Reichian circularity, number two tracing a knottier, somewhat fusiony Olympic film theme of sorts.

If Ruminant is meant to illustrate an animal, it’s a minotaur stewing down in the labyrinth, awaiting an unsuspecting victim – one assumes that’s Bergen playing that gorgeously creepy piano in tandem with the eerily resonant guitars and stark strings. By contrast, Purple Octagon shuffles along with a more motorik take on what John Hollenbeck might have done with its vamping dynamic shifts – or the Alan Parsons Project with jazz chords. The somewhat dirgey, gamelan-tinged title track’s final mix is actually a recording of a playback of the song’s original studio mix made in an old rotunda in the Bronx in order to pick up vast amounts of natural reverb.

There are also a couple of reinvented pieces from the chamber music repertoire: a stately, wary Radiohead-like interpretation of an Anton Webern canon and a György Ligeti piano etude recast as a hypnotically pulsing nocturne. Is all this jazz? Not really. It’s not really rock, either. Indie classical, maybe? Sure, why not? Postrock? That too. Ultimately it boils down to what Duke Ellington said, that there are two kinds of music, the good kind, like this, and the other kind.

Intriguing, Suspenseful, Ecologically Relevant String Themes from Dana Lyn

You have to love this story: it’s so 1971. A boy crossing an icy river gets knocked cold by a flying carp. He wakes to find himself in a mysterious underwater grotto, where a mother octopus gives him a magic branch that enables him to swim underwater just like the rest of the many sea creatures he will meet on his journey. An ancient white whale then transports him to the ocean floor, where he eventually discovers a volcanic vent. The vent suddenly explodes and blasts him back above the surface, where he swims back to shore amid a snowstorm. His family, worried about him, eventually track him down; he presents them with the magic branch and then falls into a troubled sleep. That’s the eco-disaster parable (you can read the original version on the cd package) that violinist Dana Lyn seeks to illustrate on her new album Aqualude.

Unlike what the title might imply – if you read it a certain way – this is not a sleepy album, although there is a definite narcotic, psychedelic quality to it. The obvious comparison is late 70s King Crimson. Jonathan Goldberger’s guitar growls and spirals, albeit with less of a grim focus than what Robert Fripp typically employed during that era, while Lyn and cellist Clara Kennedy team up for atmospheric washes when they’re not providing ghostly or flitting accents alongside Mike McGinnis’ lyrical clarinet and bass clarinet and Vinnie Sperazza’s remarkably straightforward drunming.

The suite opens with a stomping, trickily rhythmic, distorted guitar theme that immediately kicks off the King Crimson comparisons. Moody cello builds to a circular, atmospheric theme, then a mysteriously tinkling, whispery miniature. The first series of variations on the opening theme dances and eventually spirals on the wings of the guitar, then goes atmospheric again. Lyn likes dynamics and uses them very counterintuitively, often suspensefully, in keeping with the storyline.

A twinkling loop rises to a sort of dance of the friendly aquatic animals, which turns more uneasy as the counterpoint between instruments grows more complex. Again, they swirl down to a nebulous miniature and then it seems they locate the volcanic vent: the jaunty guitar and drums against balmy strings build to a crescendo that’s less menacing than you might expect, followed by a slow, methodical, vividly pastoral theme. Spaciously ambient washes from the strings over echoey lows begin to pulse slowly, followed by a gentle blue-sky waltz that wouldn’t be out of place in the Bill Frisell catalog. This might be the subtlest eco-disaster album ever written, leaving plenty of room for the listener to reflect and fill in the blanks. As Lyn, a passionate advocate for the world’s oceans, says in her liner notes, we still have a long way to go towards cleaning up our act.

Album of the Day 4/30/11

Brand-new May concert calendar coming on Sunday: check back with us then. In the meantime, as we do every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Saturday’s album is #640:

King Crimson – Red

King Crimson have played an awful lot of styles over their off-and-on forty-year existence – mellotron-driven symphonic rock, crazed acidic jazzy stuff, nerdy staccato new wave, ambient soundscapes. This 1974 album finds guitarist Robert Fripp at his loudest and most metal-oriented, with bassist John Wetton amazingly terse and tuneful. Side one runs through the tricky time signatures and offhandedly ominous tones of the title track, Fallen Angel, the menacing One More Red Nightmare and violin-driven Providence. The sidelong suite Starless, rips a riff from Olivier Messiaen’s Concerto for the End of Time and takes it to its logical, murderous conclusion in over fifteen minutes of increasingly brutal, slowly stalking, crescendoing intensity, including the best (and longest) one-note solo ever played on any instrument (that’s Fripp shrieking and firing off sparks over Wetton’s slowly ascending, growling bass). Here’s a random torrent.

Song of the Day 3/18/09

Every day, our top 666 songs of alltime countdown gets one step closer to #1. Wednesday’s song is #497:

King Crimson – Starless

Arguably the great British art-rock band’s finest twelve minutes or so, a suite that starts out wistful and eventually goes starless and bible black, John Wetton’s bass climbing deliberately and murderously as Robert Fripp holds down the suspense with his guitar. Classical music devotees will recognize a theme from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – figures that Fripp would be a fan, doesn’t it? From the Red lp, 1979; the link above is a torrent.