Double
Adaptor’s Live At The Village Vanguard
is exhausting stuff. I’m wondering how to make
sense of it, what to say about it, how to do it –
and its maker/s - justice. So what does Live At
The Village Vanguard sound like? It’s by
turns heavy-metal electronica (or vice-versa), it’s
the product, surely, of wandering software robots inching
crab-legged over the blogosphere, it’s choking,
hyperactive, hyperspeed, abstract, unblinking, ruminative,
unceasing, merciless, congested and congesting. Enough
adjectives for you? No? Well, how about science-fiction,
twittering, chemically-enhanced, splattercell, ultra-compressed,
superfast. The ghosts of more straightforward music
are sometimes audible for brief periods before being
extruded out of all recognition, as on Black 2.
Likewise, Saxophone Colossus begins with what
may be the ghost of Sonny Rollins, but if it is he’s
been strapped to thrashing triple-time drum and bass.
This, together with the album title’s allusion
to one of NYC’s most famous jazz clubs (and a
venue for live recordings from the likes of Bill Evans
and John Coltrane) suggest some form of engagement with
jazz. If so, it’s more at the level of granular
sound, vis-à-vis Jan Jelinek’s Loop-Finding
Jazz Records, than having anything to do with improvisation
or the blues. Is Live At The Village Vanguard
any good? Yes, it is. Recommended for fans of LP5
/ EP7-period
Autechre, the crunchier
end of Mego or Jan Jelinek if he were temporarily suffering
from arrhythmia.
Colin Buttimer
3/5 |
