GRID - GRID
The Free Jazz Collective 80
Listening to GRID, it doesn’t take long to conclude that the album’s namesake structure is a pretty poor descriptor of its musical content, almost to the point of irony. Captured live at Seizures Palace in Brooklyn, these four tracks are built of treacherously shifting layers of sludge, a hellish quicksand of shadowy subterranean tones, temperamental feedback, and tumbling drums unbeholden to any points of reference. Instead, it’s as if the trio—Matt Nelson on saxophone, Tim Dahl on bass, and Nick Podgurski on drums—had set out to repurpose the word “grid,” strip it of its conventional associations and down to some essential onomatopoeia. “GRID”: whatever it is, it doesn’t sound pleasant.
Whether the music itself sounds pleasant is another question, though there’s a reason “doom jazz” has stuck as the go-to shorthand for explaining GRID to would-be listeners. The album opens on a toxic dawn, with electronic static and swampy bubbles of bass cut with saxophone (and/or bass?) so processed it sounds like Hendrix at the limits. As “(+_+)”—as the piece is called—develops, Podgurski sustains what might be termed a free groove, drawing on all the expected gestures but keeping them unpredictably disjointed and thus full of tension, abusing the connective tissue between one stroke and the next. As a whole, the trio dismisses recognizable chops in favor of slow-moving accumulations of harsh textures and defamiliarized sounds. Although Dahl explains that “there was never a concept discussed before we started playing,” GRID displays a dogged consistency across its suite of four tracks. So while in the details the music sounds completely improvised and ready to grind apart at any moment, in the broader view it takes on an easier-to-digest and simpler-to-summarize single-minded quality, whether you label it “doom jazz” or something else.
Just as GRID may be a misleading title for this music, the album’s personnel list is another source of confounded expectations, once you hear the sounds coming out of your speakers. For one thing, it’s impressive to hear just three musicians produce so much noise. For another, it’s impressive to hear these three musicians produce the noise they do on their chosen instruments—with the help, to be fair, of electronic processing and pedal effects. We’ve heard Dahl push the boundaries of the bass with his huge sound before; on GRID he attacks from both sides, high and low. But Nelson’s sound pays even less respect to conventional assumptions. No one would blame an unsuspecting listener for going all of GRID’s 38 minutes mistaking Nelson’s saxophone for a guitar. Only here and there, for example the middle of “(-_-),” if you listen closely, can you trace what you’re hearing directly back to the familiar reed instrument. In that way, Nelson’s playing is like the album as a whole—there’s a tether to the known, but it’s disfigured from fraying.
Tue May 09 04:00:00 GMT 2017
Pitchfork 71
Saxophonist Matt Nelson is one of the more unpredictable virtuosos in New York’s underground. He played with a sense of ecstatic lyricism in a band assembled by Merrill Garbus for the album w h o k i l l. He’s delivered thoughtful supporting work in Battle Trance, a tenor-quartet group that plays compositions by Travis Laplante. And Nelson can also command center stage; his raging solos in Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones invite comparisons to some of experimental jazz’s most admired reed extremists.
This kind of performance mobility doesn’t tend to come about casually—and it’s clear that Nelson enjoys taking on discrete roles in different ensembles. On his first record as part of GRID, a collaborative trio with drummer Nick Podgurski and bassist Tim Dahl, Nelson conceives of a different challenge. This time, he often plays the saxophone covertly. As he puts his tones through a raft of pedals and electronics, the majority of Nelson’s licks sound like the work of a lead guitarist in an avant-rock trio.
On the band’s eponymous debut, Nelson’s indirect use of the saxophone is the most consistently thrilling element. During the initial minutes of the first movement (titled “(+/+)”), you might spend some time re-checking the album credits just to make sure there isn’t a guest guitarist on hand. But those slow-moving, feedbacking melodies are all Nelson. The free-improv pulses from the rhythm section create a compelling, abstract background. And when Nelson allows small bulbs of typical reed-instrument noise to flower, in the fourth minute, the listener gains a greater appreciation of the saxophonist’s command over this unusual terrain.
The NNA Tapes label has used the term “doom jazz” to describe the band’s sound, though there are some precedents that predate this subgenre coinage. Starting in the ’90s, Rashied Ali—the ferocious, late-period drummer for John Coltrane—worked with bassist Bill Laswell and the guitarist-vocalist Keiji Haino in the outfit Purple Trap. And Laswell’s ’80s partnership with saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, in the group Last Exit and on the duo album Low Life, is another touchstone for this school of noise-jazz. But those past ensembles have often been at pains to show how many song forms they can undermine: swinging wildly between clattering ragers, ambient soundscapes, and even some dance textures.
The members of GRID take a more stable view of the style. Some passages on the album have slightly more propulsive drive (see: “(-/+)”). Others a shade of greater mystery (as on “(-/-)”). But over four movements spanning 38 minutes, the differences between these sections are not as stark as on many prior rock-meets-free-jazz outings. The benefit of this more even-keeled approach is its novelty. Though the textures are extreme in nature, and densely layered, GRID doesn’t seem primarily interested in bludgeoning listeners.
That decision results in an unusually dreamy realization of the underlying aesthetic: one that brings the group’s work more in line with drone composition than with that of Laswell. The risk stalking such a choice is the fact that a listener’s attention can drift a bit. But in electing not to close with a dramatic bash of a finale, the members of this gifted trio signal that they may be fine with that reaction. Like much else on this surprising set, the quick fade-out ending creates an idiosyncratic impact that lingers well beyond the album’s running time.
Fri Mar 17 05:00:00 GMT 2017