Denton, 4.30.2024

This month's edition of Molten Plains was on a Tuesday for the first time (causing Sarah Ruth Alexander to have to sub out from her radio show), and surprisingly well attended. Ernesto Monteil had just gotten his picture in a New York Times article about Deep Vellum and The Wild Detectives, and it was announced at the end of the evening that Sarah, Ernesto, Louise Fristensky, Aaron Gonzalez, and Miguel Espinel will be performing (under the rubric Molten Plains Ensemble) at a festival in Marfa the last weekend in May. Word's getting around.

The first set was by a trio of Rachel Weaver, an environmentalist and zine-maker, on vocals and electronics, Chelsey Danielle (Pearl Earl, Helium Queens) on vibraphone and small instruments, and Will Frenkel on accordion, cello, and synth. Beginning unannounced, they conducted a nuanced dialogue on a foundation of Rachel's electronically altered utterances, with Will switching between instruments and Chelsey listening attentively and adding rhythmic and melodic counterpoint. My favorite moments came when she responded to Frenkel's tapping on the face of his bass with pentatonic theme and variations on vibes, and then later when he had moved to synth and I had to look around to see that the other sound I was hearing was Chelsey, tapping on a tambourine. 

Next set featured Mexico City-based bassist Juan Garcia (a past collaborator with Houston's Pauline Oliveros Foundation and Nameless Sound) and Houston guitarist Ryan Edwards. Juan demonstrated the variety of tones that can be obtained from an arco bass while plucking the strings and fretting false harmonics with his other hand. Ryan used a bow, eBow, and controlled feedback, regulating his volume from the amplifier, to add his input to the conversation. (I kind of wished his stage volume had been higher.) The interruption of a train in the middle of their set seemed to fit right in with what they were doing; later, they said it wasn't the loudest locomotive interruption they'd ever experienced. And it turned out the rattling sound we were hearing was from detuned strings. 

The last set brought together the powerful vocalist Lo Ramirez (Sunbuzzed) with Austin-based percussionist Lisa Cameron and the aforementioned electronic musician Louise Fristensky (who can be heard to good advantage on the Pueblo Glortha CD with Monte Espina and Liz Tonne). Lisa was coming from back-to-back sets in Austin Monday night and earlier Tuesday with saxophonist Danny Kamins and bassist Thomas Helton; she's planning some downtime this summer but until then, she'll maintain her furious gigging pace. This was the evening's most cathartic (and loudest!) performance. Lo showed the dynamic range of her voice -- from a whisper to a roar -- and exercised good mic control while Lisa used an amplified drum with strings and a wooden block suspended above it, a bowed cymbal and other devices to create welters of feedback. Louise used her synth to conjure a vast undertow of sound that rippled and rumbled and collided with the more organic sounds the others produced. A soul-cleansing experience, much needed and appreciated by all.

Things we like: Tomeka Reid Quartet, Jason Robinson, Cecil Taylor

Friday brought bounty in the form of 3+3, the new album from the Tomeka Reid Quartet. The Chicago-based cellist-composer had just visited Texas with Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet, but that unit unfortunately didn't venture up to the DFW area. This is Reid's third album since 2015 (the second on Cuneiform) at the helm of this unit with guitarist Mary Halvorson (also a member of that Melford group), bassist Thomas Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara (a regular Halvorson collaborator).

While the Reid Quartet's earlier albums were showcases for the cellist's compositions -- a necessity for an artist who first came to prominence as a side musician (with Nicole Mitchell, Mike Reed, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell, among others) -- 3+3 puts the focus on the group's improvisational abilities and ensemble interaction. The spacious sound of this string-heavy band is more conducive to hearing the resonance of arco and pizzicato cello than some larger ensembles (not that Reid has any trouble making herself heard in such contexts). 

Reid's extended compositions run the gamut from gorgeously lyrical chamber music to loose-limbed swing to untrammeled improvisation. Relieved of her duties as composer and conceptualist, Halvorson does some of her finest recorded playing. Fujiwara sometimes careens into Elvin-via-Mitch Mitchell territory, and the leader demonstrates her outstanding command and distinctive voice on her instrument.

Also received Friday: Another disc recorded (like 3+3) by Nick Lloyd at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. Saxophonist-composer Jason Robinson is an artist I was only familiar with via a 2010 duet album for Clean Feed with pianist Anthony Davis, but he's been active since the late '90s, playing with the likes of Myra Melford, Nicole Mitchell, and Rudresh Mahanthappa, as well as leading his own expandable NYC-based Janus Ensemble. 

On Ancestral Numbers 1 (out May 14 on Playscape), he ruminates on genealogy and family history, inspired by the passing of his beloved maternal grandmother, who grew up in rural Arkansas and Texas before migrating to California as a teenager. Because Robinson's an abstract thinker, the ancestral experiences that inspired these pieces -- the Atlantic crossing, Ellis Island, westward migration -- aren't necessarily telegraphed by their musical content. 

Thus, "Malachi" evokes a journey through the American South using a circuitous post-bop structure, with a Robinson solo that veers into post-Ayler freedom. "Wattensaw," named for an Arkansas town that was a way station for Robinson's forebears, deploys an angular melody over a mutant fatback groove from drummer Ches Smith that gives trombonist Michael Dessen ample blowing room. On the title track, the leader and Dessen blow nimble contrapuntal lines before and after a brief but piquantly "out" solo from pianist Joshua White. The second volume of Ancestral Numbers is due on October 8.

Reviewing Phil Freeman's Cecil Taylor book reminded me of the plethora of posthumous CT releases, not the least of which are the complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88 box set on FMP ($125 digitally via Bandcamp, for those with deep pockets) and The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert at The Town Hall NYC November 4, 1973 (which includes the 90-minute main body of the performance of which Spring of Two Blue-J's was only the encores, a la Live at Leeds).

Back in March, First Visit Archive (the digital arm of producer Werner X. Uehlinger's Hat Hut enterprise) released Live at Fat Tuesdays, February 9, 1980, the complete recording of an hour-long set CT played at the NYC club/restaurant with a band of collaborators old and new: Jimmy Lyons on alto, Ramsey Ameen on violin, Alan Silva on bass and cello, Sunny Murray and Jerome Cooper (Revolutionary Ensemble) on drums. This was the same lineup and engagement that resulted in the 1981 release It Is In the Brewing Luminous. CDs of the set are now available on Hat Hut's ezz-thetics subsidiary via Squidco. How fortunate are we.

Jeff McLeod's "Not Good Enough"

Montgomery, Alabama, the Capital of Dreams, isn't a place I would expect to find experimental DIY psychedelic musicians. But I could be wrong. I spent six weeks there once, back in Y2K, attending Academic Instructor School at Maxwell Air Force Base. While there, I visited Maya Lin's Civil Rights Memorial and Hank Williams' grave (among British and French aviators who were killed in WW2 training accidents). My buddy Steve King (a C-130 loadmaster, not The Master of Suspense) and I spent evenings passing his acoustic back and forth, making up songs about our fellow students. But Montgomery's also the home of my old HIO collaborator Terry Horn -- and the subject of this piece, "multi-instrumentalist and goofy sort of musical experimentalist" Jeff McLeod. So in this case, I'm delighted to eat my words.

Jeff's career dates back to the '90s, when he was a member of the noise-rock band bert, who had an album produced by Steve Albini. He's a founder of the Alabama Improv Co-op and the Subversive Workshop newsletter/record label. He splatters psychedelic guitar skree all over Dynamic Negativism, a 2002 duet album with North Carolina polymath Bret Hart. He undertakes some of the damnedest impressionistic solo live Chapman Stick explorations I could even imagine on 2004's MUST: A Crackpot Life Study in Five Movements. 

On the other hand, he's also responsible for the gentle solo guitar tranquility (with a little reverb and eBow) of 2009 Dutch release Ever-Stretching Shadow. He also created a trio of electronic realizations under the Forethinking rubric, and a trilogy of recordings (Under Dim Self, Scalps of Gods, and Borne Down Upon, released 2011-2013) that employ sampling, synthesis, and McLeod's voice to express what was on his mind at that time. And I'm just scratching the surface here (working my way forward, slowly).

But now to the matter at hand -- namely, McLeod's current release, Not Good Enough, just released April 19 and available digitally or on CD via his Bandcamp page. McLeod says it's a "'proof-of-concept' album about [his] (unhealthy) relationship with musicks." I don't doubt that for a minute. The first thing I noticed when I cued up "Faking" (the featured track on Bandcamp), once I got past the dark, moody atmospherics of the intro, was that McLeod sings a lot like Daron Beck from Pinkish Black, minus the vocal F/X Daron's been known to favor -- a good thing in my book, since both men have distinctive low-register quivers, the perfect vehicle for conveying the aura of menace that Jeff does here. When McLeod takes off an a quavering, pitch-altered guitar solo, it sounds like a second voice shaking in terror.

Unlike lots of weird-music makers, McLeod isn't one to forego melody or thematic development, so on an extended instrumental like "Quaalude Eggs," the listener's free to turn off their mind, relax and float downstream and not worry -- Cap'n Jeff is steering the riverboat, from one diverting musical episode to the next. The harmonized guitars on "Old Ideas (modified)" put me in mind of the Allmans (the recently departed Dickey Betts being very much in my thoughts these days) or maybe Captain Beyond (the FM radio appearance of whose "Sufficiently Breathless" once rescued me from a very not-good LSD experience).

Taking it back to the top, the title track (which opens the album) returns to the headspace occupied by the aforementioned Pinkish Black, or maybe Scott Walker circa The Drift. "Nonaudience" is a nicely orchestrated blend of actual and virtual instruments, with McLeod's voice and guitar as colors in his artist's palette (or running down his canvas). Not Good Enough is proof positive that the advent of sampling and sequencing technology enabled great leaps forward in psychedelic music production by DIY tinkerers like Jeff McLeod (or closer to home, kindred spirits like Liquid Sound Company and Herd of Instinct). A sonic bath I could get in the habit of immersing myself in. I'd say it's plenty good enough.

FTW, 4.20.2024

Heavy rains forced many of the day's weed-related revels to move indoors or reschedule, but we had plans of our own: a night at Amphibian Stage to see Egla Birmingham Hassan's production of George Brant's historical musical Marie and Rosetta (with my buddy Darrin Kobetich providing offstage guitar alongside musical director Steven A. Taylor).

In recent years, the gospel singer-songwriter-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe has received belated recognition for her musical innovations. Ray Charles always gets props for bringing the sound of the Black church into R&B, but Tharpe was fronting big bands in clubs and ballrooms as early as 1938. Her distorted electric guitar playing puts her directly in the line that leads from Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker to Chuck Berry. Marie and Rosetta focuses on her relationship with singer-pianist Marie Knight, her late '40s-early '50s performing partner.

In Amphibian's production, veteran Dallasite Denise Lee and Chicagoan newcomer Denise Jackson inhabit the roles of Tharpe and Knight, respectively. They play pain for laughs (Tharpe's memory of white visitors to her childhood church raining "pennies from Heaven" on her as she sang is particularly poignant) and infuse their sanctified characters with earthy humanity, which they transcend when they raise their voices in song. Lee's Rosetta is assertive and shows a hard-won comfort in her own skin. Jackson's Marie starts out more tentative and conflicted, but grows in confidence before the moving conclusion. 

The briskly scripted, songful 90 minutes, with minimal staging, evoked memories of Jubilee Theatre back in Rudy Eastman's days in at least one Fort Worth theatergoer. Taylor and Kobetich previously worked together on Jubilee's It Ain't Nothing But the Blues, and the musical director's piano evoked the period's musical styles with harmonic richness. Metalhead-turned-acoustic improviser Kobetich did a great job of playing idiomatically correct stylings on National resophonic and Gibson electric guitars. Lee's stage presence is so commanding that it didn't even matter if you could tell she wasn't really playing.

There are four more performances of Marie and Rosetta, starting at 8pm this Thursday through Sunday. Highly recommended.

Things we like: Peter Van Huffel's Calisto, Ivo Perelman, Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Shane Parish

Bandcamp Friday #40 is coming May 3, then the program (in which the platform foregoes their cut of profits for a day, leaving all your coins for the artists) goes on vacation until September 3. A few suggestions for the suggestible listener follow.

After five albums with Gorilla Mask, an "angry jazz" band with rock dynamics, Berlin-based Canadian saxophonist Peter Van Huffel returns with something different: a bassless quartet called Callisto and a new Clean Feed CD, Meandering Demons. This time out, Van Huffel lays down his alto in favor of his baritone and turns his co-conspirators -- fiery trumpeter Lina Allemano, pianist/electronic musician Antonio Anissegos, and drummer Joe Hertenstein -- loose on a set of his finest compositions yet.

"Rude Awakening" opens with head-spinning loop effects on the bari before the band enters, playing an angular melody over an oddly syncopated groove, then Anissegos' electronics propel the band into '70s Miles territory. "Transient Being" is a darkly ruminative piece that creates a cinematic mood of unease. "Barrel of Monkeys" juxtaposes Andrew Hill-like impressionism with a shuffle beat. My favorite Van Huffel outing to date, and I'm now motivated to check out Allemano's work as a leader.

The next item under consideration came my way via a Discogs seller as a "something's extra." (Thanks, colinec!) Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman is known for his work in the freeblow arena (particularly his collaborations with the estimable pianist Matthew Shipp). On Truth Seeker, released in February on the Polish label Fundacja Slucaj (who also have some archival Cecil Taylor items in their catalog, among other delights), he stands where Rollins, Ornette, and Joe Henderson once stood, at the helm of a tenor-led trio. Backed to the hilt by Mark Helias on bass and Tom Rainey on drums, Perelman undertakes some Rollins-esque thematic improvisation -- the result, he says, of switching to an MC Gregory mouthpiece, which focuses and directs his explorations in unaccustomed ways. An eminently satisfying set.

Latest from San Francisco-based guitar experimentalist Ernesto Diaz-Infante is a cassette, Amor Celestial, on the Albany, NY-based Tape Drift label, just released on April 5. The two-part dronefest starts out with Diaz-Infante obsessively repeating a fuzzed-out arpeggio like a one-man doom metal band over singing bowls, then interjecting stinging Sharrockian chaos-slide, which gives way first to slowly pulsing feedback, then gently chiming harmonics that build to crashing thunderclaps of metallic clangor. Second part opens with throbbing tanpura pulsations and tuneless strummarama like a kid who's showing you he knows how to "play" guitar before the arpeggio from Part One returns, albeit with less density. 

As I begin to dissociate, the strums give way to single note picking, and the slide returns, but ethereal this time, like the interstices between songs on Strictly Personal. There's even a little Jeff Beck-on-Yardbirds-"I'm a Man" choke-strum action, my pick for the angriest guitar sound ever, only here it's decontextualized to another ghostly memory on the trip. I even started to hear the Winkie Guards' chant from The Wizard of Oz in that drone. You get the idea. A groovy piece of DIY psychedelia, recommended if you'd dig meditating to a loop of the intro from Steppenwolf's "Magic Carpet Ride," or if your favorite Boris albums are Flood and Feedbacker. (Me too!)

Last but surely not least, my very own last month's Bandcamp Friday selection: Repertoire, the brand-new (drops May 10) solo acoustic LP from North Carolina-based guitar ace Shane Parish. Shane's one part math-rock nerd (ten albums and counting with the band Ahleuchatistas), one part Fahey-esque American primitive folk weirdo. He transcribed the music from Bill Orcutt's Music for Four Guitars and helped play it as a member of Orcutt's Guitar Quartet. (His Quartet-mate Wendy Eisenberg penned liner notes for this album, and they have a neat duet album, Nervous Systems, that they cut within scant hours of their first meeting back in 2018.) For his trouble, Parish got this album released on Orcutt's Palilalia label, and it's a corker (at least judging from the half-dozen tracks I got to download for having pre-ordered it last month, plus I've been watching two year old YouTube video of Parish playing Captain Beefheart's "One Red Rose That I Mean," also included here). 

Repertoire is a collection of Shane's reimaginings of other people's songs, and their provenance gives you an inkling of the depth and breadth of the guitarist's musical interests. Besides the Beefheart, there are tunes here from Ornette Coleman, Aphex Twin, the Minutemen, John Cage, Kraftwerk, Eric Dolphy, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra. Parish really digs Charles Mingus -- covers no fewer than three of the titanic bassist-composer's works, my current favorite being his countrified take on "Better Get Hit In Your Soul." Biggest surprise here is probably Fred Rogers' "It's You I Like," but it really shouldn't be, Parish being a good dad -- there's YouTube video of him and his kid with music from his earlier solo acoustic LP Undertaker Please Drive Slow, on John Zorn's Tzadik label. Dig it? Get it!

Phil Freeman's "In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor"

As of April 5, it's been six years that we've been living in a world without the titanic pianist-composer Cecil Taylor -- maybe the greatest musician of my lifetime (only Ornette Coleman and Pauline Oliveros come close, in my estimation). I only ever saw him play in person once, under suboptimal conditions (the contentious 1977 Carnegie Hall concert with Mary Lou Williams), but it left an indelible impression. 

Taylor worked the entire keyboard with an incredibly strong and percussive attack that involved both precise control and fierce abandon, unleashing crashing chords, dissonant clusters, and cascades of high register notes, riding a volcanic flow of energy. I was relatively new to jazz, but I didn't need to comprehend what I was witnessing to be affected by the intensity of the performance (people were standing up screaming in the balconies). At the time I compared it to being caught outside in a hurricane; only later did I come to realize that Taylor's prodigious technique was the result of a rigorous practice regimen, and that his compositions were highly arranged and rehearsed. The "force of nature" had intention. Over the years, listening to the records and reading A.B. Spellman, Amiri Baraka, Valerie Wilmer, Gary Giddins, and Greg Tate's scrawl on Cecil, I've come to understand a bit more about the artist and his process. But it still sounds like magic.

In his new book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor (due for publication later this year on a date TBD), Phil Freeman -- co-founder of Burning Ambulance and a scribe whose scrawl has appeared in The Wire, The Village Voice, and Signal To Noise (RIP), among other estimable journals -- trains an analytical eye on Taylor's art, with details of the artist's personal life only included when relevant to the main narrative arc. This is respectful and appropriate when dealing with a subject who inhabited a persona that he used, at least in part, to keep outsiders at a distance. Freeman's a good reporter and researcher, a fan for 25 years who spent a couple of days with Taylor in 2016, and wherever possible, his text is based on his own experience or interviews with Taylor's living familiars (notable exception: Andrew Cyrille). When the author draws on published sources, they are scrupulously credited. 

Freeman traces Taylor's trajectory from his earliest recordings (produced by Tom Wilson and Nat Hentoff); the historic '62 sojourn in Scandinavia, in company of Jimmy Lyons, Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray; the band with Lyons and Andrew Cyrille, from their '66 Blue Note albums through Taylor's interval in academia and his mid-'70s re-emergence; the '78 band with Ronald Shannon Jackson (which I love as unreasonably as I do the '64 Mingus band); his late-'80s residence in Berlin, his collaborations with Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley, and beyond. I am now motivated to investigate some of Taylor's '90s and '00s work that I overlooked. 

I was surprised to learn that the percussionist Andre Martinez, who seemed like excess baggage in the 1991 Burning Poles video (with William Parker and Tony Oxley), turns out to have been a key element in Taylor's '80s bands (particularly the Orchestra of Two Continents). You might quibble (as did I) with some of Freeman's critical judgments: Did Rudy Van Gelder over-record the horns and under-record the piano and drums on Unit Structures? Maybe. Was Ramsey Ameen the indispensable member of the '78 band? I beg to differ. Then again, having spirited disagreements based on having heard the music is part of the fun of reading books like this.

Taylor saw written scores in standard notation as an impediment to music making; he used non-standard notation for his scores and transmitted the information orally at rehearsals. While Freeman covers this, one would have liked to read a bit more about Taylor's process of  preparing his musicians for performance -- but then, that would make this a different book.

Personal glimpses of the artist are fleeting, but poignant. In his upper middle class upbringing, Taylor was not unlike Duke Ellington, whom he admired. The influence of Taylor's parents can't be overstated. Taylor appears to have acquired much more of the culture from living in his mother's house than he did in schools, including the New England Conservatory (I can relate). His father's acceptance of his queerness gave Cecil a level of comfort with his sexuality that was probably unusual for the time (although it didn't prevent him from bridling when Stanley Crouch casually outed him in a 1983 Village Voice article). Taylor liked to party, and had a preternatural endurance for night life, but seems to have put his art ahead of personal relationships throughout his life. His exploitation by a corrupt associate after being awarded the Kyoto Prize in 2013 is a cautionary tale of elder abuse (it was discovered and reported by an Australian filmmaker who was making a documentary on Taylor). 

Taylor died intestate, and the fate of his estate remains in suspense. His place in history is unassailable. His music remains magic. And Freeman has written a highly readable book, worthy of its subject. 

Things we like: Max Kutner

I've written before that Max Kutner is my pick for the current working guitarist most deserving of wider recognition. I first heard him with the Grandmothers of Invention on the tour when they played the One Size Fits All album. Due to some kind of beef between drummer Chris Garcia and Napoleon Murphy Brock, their Kessler Theatre set that I witnessed was lacking my favorite track from that album, "Inca Roads," but that was hardly Max's fault. Between that tour and the release of his albums I've reviewed with Android Trio, High Flavors Quintet, and Partial Custody (whom I'm looking forward to hearing in person when they visit Texas in August), Kutner toured with the 21st century reunion edition of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (show information and links to YouTube vids here). He also released a number of recordings with different ensembles that we'll be considering today.

Predating Kutner's involvement with the Grandmothers, The Royal Us had a unique take on "weird folk": acoustic instruments, playing traditional-ish arrangements, run through a synthesizer and laptop. (Imagine if Brian Eno had joined Steeleye Span instead of Roxy Music out of art school and you'll have some idea what's going on here.) Frontwoman Heather Lockie is an appealing song stylist and violist, Steven Van Betten is second guitarist and vocalist, and Brian Saia provides the electronic treatments. I have a pre-release CD-R of their 2013 release And You..., which remains digitally available via Bandcamp. Their take on the Child ballad "House Carpenter" (aka "The Daemon Lover") is truly surreal. 

The band Bubbeleh -- which included members of an earlier Afrobeat ensemble, The Sogo Takeover -- combined Eastern European Jewish folk music with jazz (from New Orleans to '70s Miles!), progressive rock, surf music, and whatever else the principals (Kutner and keyboardist Philip "Simcha" Rankin) felt like adding to the mix. The results are in keeping with Don Byron's more-or-less straight takes on the Mickey Katz songbook, John Zorn's mashup (under the rubric Masada) of Ornette Coleman and klezmer, and Ohioans Golems of the Red Planet's reworking of the Masada catalog as surf-rock-cum-VU. Don't let the goof-Yiddish song titles ("Schmutzy Glasses," "Grepse," "Simcha Boytchik Hintele") fool you into thinking this is a joke band; these meshuggahs play their tuchuses off, clarinetist Andrew Conrad, trumpeter Greg Zilboorg, and drummer Colin Woodford especially. And some of Kutner's echo-drenched excursions take him into Marc Ribot-doing-Jarmusch-soundtrack territory. Bubbeleh's self-titled 2014 CD remains digitally Bandcamp-available.

Of greatest interest here, because it's the closest thing to a direct precursor to Kutner's current outfit Partial Custody, is Evil Genius, a trio that teams Kutner's guitar with Stefan Kac's tuba and Mike Lockwood's drums. The result sounds like an agreeable collision of the Magic Band, Arthur Blythe's "tuba band" with Bob Stewart, and John Abercrombie's Gateway Trio. On their 2015 debut, Bitter Human, we hear the sound of expert musicians with fierce chops and a fair amount of humor, having fun playing off each other and comfortable enough to do so with abandon. Kutner penned seven of the album's ten tunes; my favorites are "Juke Prompt," which has an Afrobeat feel (shads of Sogo Takeover!) with an extended "out" section in the middle, and "(Share In A) Regional Meat Vision," which wends its way through several tempo changes and episodes of intense shredding.

Material for the second Evil Genius album, 2018's Experiments on Human Subjects, was largely composed on the road during the band's first national tour, and the music has a harsher, more rock-directed sound. Kac contributed seven of the 11 pieces, Kutner three, and Lockwood one. They kick the door open with Kac's Crimsonoid "Skateboarders Versus Security Guards: Double Agents in a Proxy War Between the Forces of Good and Evil" and follow it with the mutant funk of Kutner's "Tour de Stadt" (with the composer on bass, including a fuzzy solo). Other standout tracks include "Arctic Circle," which features a spiky Kutner solo, replete with extended techniques and ringing harmonics, and "Colonel Karl Marx and Keenan McCardell," a tour de force for Kac, with Kutner and Lockwood rocking ferociously alongside him. Now back to my digital copy of Partial Custody, which you owe it to yourself to hear if any of the above sounds interesting to you.