Party Pack, Ice

I've been far too silent on these pages. But that is going to end now. My life has been a tumbling barrel of chattering, hysterical monkeys but I am stopping the barrel in its tracks. That means I can resume posting more often. To inaugurate the new awakening, I cover today something you'd probably never hear about if I did not say something here and now.

It's a rather obscure EP CD by Party Pack. Ice (pF Mentum CD107) is the title. Now why should you care about something you've probably no idea about? It is in part the whole point of why I write about music. To pass on what turns me on in the hope that it will turn YOU on, that's always part of the aim.

Part Pack is a quintet of Adam Hopkins on bass (and the composer on this), Patrick Breiner and Eric Trudel on tenor saxes, Dustin Carlson on guitar, and Nathan Ellman Bell on drums. Maybe you do not know these names? The point of course is the music...if good, the names follow!

And this is good, very good indeed. It is psychedelic freedom jazz-rock, I guess you could say. It is loose but clear in direction. It has a rock aggression and an avant jazz heat.

And it just SOUNDS great. That is the point, right? It is one of those advanced underground things that motors the music forward. And because nobody else will buy it, it is your duty to support such things by doing so. I say that not to offend you. Artists like this NEED your support. And if you listen carefully, you will I think agree that it is music that deserves attention.

OK? Please.

HaUtUllin, Music for Very Electric Guitar, Drums and Live Electronics

Plug in your minds and journey to Copenhagen, where the duo HaUtUllin (Barefoot Records) is doing its own plugging in--guitar, live electronics, effects, drums--readying the arsenal and getting ready to assault your senses. They let loose. Good lord! Guitarist Markus Pesonen and drummer Håkon Berre give you 65 minutes of well-conceived very outside post-Hendrixian free jazz psychedelia. Pesonen is a guitarist of greatly inventive sonic imagination and Berre goes with him like anything but a Mini-Me, more like a musical Maxi-Me. They have some quiet moments (which work quite well) but when they drench your being with effects-laden distortion, bends, thrashes, bashes and growls, you know that they are for real.

This kind of music has come a long way since the olden days when my friends and I traumatized the neighbors from the open-doored garage where we set up and crazed out on weekends. HaUtUllin have made of such Hendrix-inspired noodlings a directed free music that has smarts as well as ultra-space.

If you like out electric free jazz-rock, you probably already know what they can do in Scandinavia, I will bet. This is one of the newest directed assaults from there, and one of the best!