Binker and Moses - Feeding the Machine

The Quietus

If an early December gig in the boxy Peckham Audio was intended as a road-test for their new material, Binker (Golding) and Moses (Boyd) must have come away from that positively feral ovation flushed with fresh confidence. Still, it was a rather curious atmosphere they engineered. Though far from a pedestrian set – Binker’s ouroboric circular breathing on soprano sax almost immediately coiled my senses into a giddy muddle – but somehow the beatific electronic drone with which the show ebbed away made for a palatable segue into Sunday Evening Melancholia.

That same drone, if my memory serves, divinely backdrops a highlight from their new LP, ‘After The Machine Settles’, emerging from a sandstorm of spliced instrumental specks like the colouring rim of an evening horizon or the glowing backing strings of Eberhard Weber’s ECM staples. After a couple of minutes Moses’s drums bound in to haul us up into the heavens, and as moments go it’s really quite ecstatic – a triumph of the new dynamics furnished by the addition of Max Luthert on “electronic effects”. Rather than a flail towards novelty (they’re far too talented for that), these synth-y imbrications mark a considered embrace of the studio context they’d eschewed for going on five years.

On opener ‘Asynchronous Intervals’ Golding puffs with controlled brawn atop a bed of looped minimalist flutters, reminiscent of recent work by Patrick Shiroishi and Bendik Giske. ‘Active-Multiple-Fetish-Overlord’ then lunges into mixing-board miscreance, dubbing out smoky Black Lodge-appropriate tenor sax lisps into fizzing delayed static while Boyd’s snare hits bottleneck into a growl. This is the tech impingement at its most thrilling and effective, a mischievous scrambling of what we thought we knew about the duo which recalls the cyborg dalliances of the Peter Evans Quintet on 2011’s Ghosts.

The central two of the six tracks are a bit of a cruise by comparison, not quite capturing either the impressive dusky visions of the album at large or the avant disposition which gave live recordings like 2018’s Alive in the East? their particular galvanising flair; bigger fans of astral outfits like The Comet Is Coming than me will probably find more to love at this point, on the thumping ‘Accelerometer Overdose’ especially. Machine-fed streaks of looping refrains and rippling electronics make for a pleasing melange, no doubt, but it’s the surrounding four tracks which really vindicate the horizon-opening technocultural paradigm which apparently informed the album’s concept. As ‘Because Because’ closes things out with a tempest of wheeling soprano brilliance from Binker, however, it’s hard to feel that this duo could misapply their talents to whatever paths they might bend.

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The Free Jazz Collective 70

By William Rossi

London musicians Binker Golding and Moses Boyd on saxophone and drums respectively have been making a name for themselves in the jazz scene over the last few years, Boyd going as far as being nominated for a Mercury Prize for his solo album in 2020 and Golding leading his quartet and participating in a trio with John Edwards & Steve Noble. When their solo careers aren't keeping them too busy they collaborate as the Nu-Jazz duo Binker and Moses.

While most nu-jazz takes major inspiration from funk and hip-hop this album showcases the couple choosing a different path, opting to pick their contaminations from the British electronic music scene, dub and breakbeat mainly.

After 5 years since their last duo effort they've finally decided to come back for this new release, assisted by Max Luther on tape loops and electronics. Feeding the Machine is a remarkably easy album to listen to. The first track "Asynchronous Intervals" is a blissful meditation, with Binker's saxophone chasing after itself through a soundscape of processed sax and atmospheric drums. His playing is very lyrical, bluesy and straightforward, clearly inspired by the greats we're all familiar with, never letting itself be bogged down by pointless flash: he rarely plays "outside" or makes use of extended techniques, only choosing to do so sporadically. Some of the more demanding listeners could dismiss this kind of playing as unadventurous but knowing what Binker is capable of in different contexts I'm confident this was a deliberate choice in order to keep the album anchored to the Jazz tradition in contrast with the modern contaminations, contaminations that take center stage on "Active-Multiple-Fetish-Overlord", in which the dubby effects morph all the instruments almost beyond recognition or on "After The Machine Settles'', where Max Luthert's tapes and manipulations turn the signal fed into them into a primordial soup of echoes and reverbs where even a single snare hit is made into a glitchy electronic scream.

Luthert's contributions aren't limited to being so overt and can be much subtler, like the sub-bass on "Accelerometer Overdose" that provides a foundation for Binker's sax solo or the rhythmic modular synth on "Feed Infinite" that plays off Moses' drums to create a polyrhythmic canvass for the duo to shine, and shine they do: on "Feed Infinite" the drumming really takes center stage and Moses shows off his chops, an exercise maybe at its apex on "Accelerometer Overdose", which lives up to its name with newfound physicality and energy, the drums exploding into a breakbeat worthy of an Aphex Twin track.

There's hints of a narrative throughout the record: it starting out with clearer classic jazz influences and the electronics becoming more and more prominent throughout, culminating on the first half of "After The Machine Settles" from which the duo emerges with novel confidence to embrace their more bop and blues identity, the last track "Because Because" being very similar to the first one in mood and structure, ending with its sax almost sounding like birds chirping at dawn welcoming you to a new day.

What this narrative implies is open to interpretation, at least to me: it could be about life's cyclicality, the unstoppable growth of industry (not synonymous with progress), the need for different cultures to influence each other to evolve into something better, positive and negative interpretations that depending on the audience's mood at the time of listening could trump the others but none that feels definitive; all you know when finishing the album is that it ended way too quickly and while the machine might have been fed you're not even close to being done with trying to absorb all this great album has to offer and you just press play again.

The Guardian 0

(Gearbox)
The sax of Binker Golding and the drums of Moses Boyd are joined by the modular synths of Max Luthert on this wild, atmospheric fourth album