Friday, February 5, 2016

Jus, Jacob Lindsay, Ava Mendoza, Damon Smith, Weasel Walter, 2007

We go back a few years to 2007. Remember then? Well, whether you do or not doesn't matter, especially, for now, because at the moment what concerns us is the album recorded that year, Jus (bpa013). It is a confluent gathering, a quartet featuring Jacob Lindsay on all manner of clarinets, Ava Mendoza on electric guitar, Damon Smith on "7-string ergo-bass" and something called a "Hoopp", and Weasel Walter on drums, percussion and bagpipes.

Now what makes this one interesting is the consistently out, pointillated, pin-point surgical entrance of sound structures in space. The sound colors are extraordinarily fertile and evocative. This is improv with a new music kind of slant, operating within the "tradition" of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, say, or MEV, in other words abstracted and cumulative, four-way just about all the time, continuous and creatively inventive.

It's not a music where you say to yourself, "Wow, Listen to that bass clarinet!" so much as you experience sonic wholes made up of the ingenious contributions of all four in out counterpoint.

Everyone is key most all the time, so it is not a music where you single out foreground from background. It is simply music that occupies pan-ground if you please.

There is most interesting bass and guitar work as a part of the whole, so I place the write up on this blog, but the reed and percussion contributions are no less interesting or important.

An hour of this, thanks to the insightful sound sculpting consistently present, does not seem at all taxing, assuming you already understand the outside lanes of getting to music. It fascinates, enthralls and refuses to abandon the rarefied realms it occupies, but instead generates ever new combinations of timbre and texture.

So the music succeeds in so doing. This is not something "easy to do" well. Do not fool yourself. Sit down with three others and try to get to this level. You doubtless will find it is not easy to be both self-ful and selfless with three others. Jus, then, is an achievement, a critical outing on the outer fringes that does what it does with a certain brilliance. It's a good example of a great result in this sphere. Put your ears on deep-listening mode and you will get much from this.

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