FLANGER - Outer Space/Inner Space

Burnt Friedman and Atom™ are both very prolific and talented musicians. Friedman has released records with The Nu Dub Players on Stefan Betke’s ~Scape, or under his Nonplace Urban Field, Drome or Some More Crime guises, as well as Con Ritmo last year, and Plays Love Songs this year, both published on his own Nonplace imprint. Atom™, born Uwe Schmidt, is even more prolific, as he is credited with over a hundred and fifty albums released under various aliases, including Atom Heart, Lassique Benthaus or Señor Coconut. He is also head of the Rather Interesting label. Although both men lived only two hundred kilometres apart in Germany, they met in the crater of an extinct volcano in Australia. Soon, the idea of working together flourished, and Flanger was born.
For this third album, Flanger and Atom™ draw as much from their electronic past as from their mutual love of avant-garde jazz forms. If, like its predecessors, Templates and Midnight Sound, Outer Space/Inner Space relies on artificial sounds and effect, this time round, the duo also got on board live musicians, recruited all over the world, to enhance their compositions and explore new grounds. Tracks were programmed by Friedman and Atom™, with space for other instrumentists to insert some extra elements and give a different twist to the album. Outer Space/Inner Space is a record inhabited by the spirit of free jazz, and the electronic distortions don’t alter in any way the volatile character of the genre. The album opens with a morphing synthesized voice layered over a breackbeat/bip-bop inspired beat, before the title track really kicks in, in a deluge of vibraphones, syncopated pianos and saxophones. This constant shift between atmosphere progressively blurs the definite lines between electronic and organic, to create a challenging soundscape. Percussions are fierce, bass line groovy, rhythm patterns constantly changing, and treatments applied with respect of the musical canvas collected. The eight tracks included on Outer Space/Inner Space explore a variety of grooves, from the Latin inspired Unosietecero to the dirty funk of Inner Spacesuite and the effervescent, almost Squarepusher-esque The Men Who Fell From Earth, but the duo always manage to keep perfectly on track, never letting their guard down once, and bringing together some magnificent moments of flamboyant beauty.
With this step towards live music, Flanger open a whole new horizon and create some intricate soundscapes, while retaining an incredibly human feel. Outer Space/Inner Space is innovative, clever and fresh.