Spring Heel Jack
Masses
[Thirsty Ear]
Rating: 8.6
Spring Heel Jack entered the electronica scene in the mid-90's, clearly on
the living-room listening side of the drum-n-bass spectrum. The beats on
1996's 68 Million Shades came complex, but despite their rapid pace
the overall sonic texture was subdued, making for a smooth, pedestrian vibe.
The following album, Busy Curious Thirsty, locked into the harder
dance groove that was developing at the time, though a closer listen showed
that the real intent was the creation of a roughened, more diverse sound.
The new direction lost a lot of their audience, though, and the ambient
pieces were numbingly repetitious. In a typical major label move, Island
dropped the duo from its roster.
Since then, John Coxon and Ashley Wales have been working hard, and each of
their recent endeavors have been more successful-- from the driving, eerie
Treader to the slightly softer, more cinematic Disappeared and
the noisy ambient experiments collected on Oddities. They've also
taken a cue from Fila Brazillia, who produced the strangely pristine luster
on Greg Dulli's Twilight Singers project. Coxon & Wales collaborated with
Low in 2000 on the Bombscare EP, in which all junglist tendencies
vanished, subsumed into Low's stark minimalism; likewise, Alan Sparhawk & Co.
found their fragile song frames reinforced by a mesh of synthetic subtlety
and carefully controlled drones. The union got called "experimental" mostly
due to the uncomfortable tension the album evoked.
Masses invigorates the Thirsty Ear label's fusion project, "The Blue
Series Continuum." Spring Heel Jack have toyed with jazz since their early
days-- sampling a brassy trumpet trill here, employing a live percussion
sample from Tortoise there-- but as time progressed, they showed interest in
jazz as a structural template rather than cut-and-paste decoration. For
Masses, they recorded a number of ambient soundscapes composed of
crackling feedback and found sound (once again absent of breakbeats), and
gathered choice labelmates to improvise over the recordings. Some of the
most influential names in the new breed of free jazz participated, from the
dynamic duo of pianist Matthew Shipp and double bassist William Parker to
mercurial saxophonist Evan Parker. The result is the most intense,
fascinating album of Spring Heel Jack's career.
"Chorale" opens in static pulses. Shipp hesitantly takes lead with four-
and five-note piano clusters, while William Parker's bass explores the space
between the rumbling drones. One aspect of the prerecorded soundtracks is
that the musicians can slow down and test intimate, abstract harmonies
usually only available to duos and trios. Evan Parker's lone soprano sax
line repeats after long intervals, intriguingly programmatic considering his
usual repertoire. This melancholy motif is the only semblance of melody in
the entire song, and the noir ambience would fit perfectly in Blade
Runner when Deckard sips his drink alone in the dim living room.
"Chiaroscuro" defines an opposite approach-- an amplified two-note bassline
followed by a handclap serves as the rhythmic anchor for the entire track.
Hardly boring, this relentless, aggressive reverb is the current through
which Daniel Carter runs his saxophone, at first a playful expedition that
becomes increasingly strained and frenetic. Guillermo Brown busts three
minutes afterwards with overlapping bass-drum rolls and snares, adding to
the uneasiness. Trying to isolate the organic from the preprocessed is
difficult; at times, the streaks of Ed Coxon's violin blend seamlessly with
the humming bed of distortion.
The title track, on which all players are involved, is by far the standout.
Brown plays schizophrenically liberated percussion, abusing cowbells and the
drumstand itself as pianist Shipp jabs at the low register ivory keys. A
sudden crescendo: seconds too late, you realize these were pebbles before the
rockslide. The onslaught erupts, burying the listener in a lung-collapsing
surge of saxophone wails, trumpet squeals and double-bass throttling. The
moment ends as soon as it began, dispersing into Brown's maniacally inspired
building-block clatter. If the ascendant free jazz of the 1960's came to be
known as "Fire Music," the elemental force here takes place somewhere between
metamorphic earth and storm-strewn air, though the electrical fury can hardly
be traced back along its silicate tangents to any original resting place.
But don't assume that the entire album is impenetrable noise. A few short
interludes separate the longer works, giving single musicians the chance to
test their mettle against the compositions. On "Cross," I felt transported
to a swirling fantasia, sure that the background was tampering with
Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" until I realized that this was just Mat Maneri
in the foreground on acoustic and electric viola. "Salt" is a comparatively
straightforward number, launched by Brown and William Parker's hard-bop
rhythm and spiced by Shipp's Monk-like vamping. But the final track, "Coda,"
returns to the spatial acoustics of the first. Coxon and Wales pull the
buzzing chimes of their earliest work off the lathe, causing the trumpet-like
microtonality of Maneri's viola to recede into the background.
Masses compresses so many components: improv artists from New York jam
with Londoners and other Europeans, organic instruments collide with digital
spree, free jazz is tempered by prerecorded loops. Curated by Matthew Shipp
and sequenced by the Spring Heel boys, this is steaming hot fusion, a record
whose density and emotional nuance requires repeated listening to decipher.
Many questions are raised, but the one that tugs most anxiously in my mind
is whether Coxon and Wales will attempt improvisational electronics
themselves on future projects.
-Christopher Dare