Music

Reviews:

"Here at last is a collection of recordings from the 2001 stateside tour of this foursome, all like-minds and prolifics within the vibrant improv communities of Berlin and Boston. Bhob Rainey and Axel Doerner in particular have emerged as leaders in the extended technique of breathy brass playing, where each surface of their horns becomes available as an amplified textural playground, as easily hollowed out for rustling, gaseous overflows as transformed into a turbine of magnified industrial clang. Their approach to improvisation means a more acute interaction with the instrument, an inward expansion on the part of each player that few have been able to jive successfully against the responsibilities of the ensemble setting. Too often the immaterial (or ultra-material) nature of the style creates barriers between musicians, who are tempted into layers of colorless ambience or dispassionate exchanges in noise. Even Doerner and Rainey, who maintain astonishing levels of quality in both solo and group play, sometimes walk into the occasional critique of their work as too thin or minimal in its concerns, its dynamics too hidden. These criticisms have no bearing on Thanks, Cash, a disc as sonically dense as anything I've heard from these players, full of patient, attuned interactions and rich, dark detail. Rainey's Nmperign bandmate Greg Kelley borrows from the bristly, stunted half-blurts of that group's tenser moments, laying down colored accents and squealing feedback takeovers atop Doerner's closely percussive breathing exercises and minimal electronic accompaniment. The pure tones and static waves of his computer mesh with the ghostlike hover of Andrea Neumann's innenklavier, producing a painted backdrop of throbbing and electric earth tones, a synthetic and darkly green atmosphere where Rainey's horn hobbles like a wind-tricked door. He moves with thrilling impulse from grand, industrial hollows to the claustrophobic frenzy of spit-soaked insects in the bell of his sax, each sensation delivered with an anticipated and appropriate magnitude. Greater than any one contribution, however, is the ambience of the whole. The players are less interested in reaction or embellishment as with a thick textural weave, often achieved as the three horns blend a breathing feedback pattern over Neumann's detached string tangles. At times the sound is overpowering and anxious, certainly busier, and touching harsher extremes than the Nmperign records, but reaching for a new kind of lushness, a forest of electrical fields and buried energy. The four have created a writhing lifeform, nuanced and surprising all at once, and something I can barely imagine witnessing live"

- Andrew Culler, Brainwashed