GOOD - "Transient"
(Texistential Waveform-003 2009)
GOOD - "Transient"
(Texistential Waveform-003 2009)
From Aural Innovations July 2009 update
"Recorded live in preparation for the show at Avant Garden in Houston Texas, October '08", here we have some pretty neat progressive chunky instrumental grooves falling in the 5-8 minute range, with lots of improv and noodling on top. They do well at mingling lots of programming, keyboards and actual playing, and considering it's live, I assume there to be a couple of players here, though such info was not given in the liner notes. The title of the opening track, "Dense System", might be a pretty fair adjective to describe the music, dense in its layering of sounds, systematic in the linear/loop quality of the jams. "Superspring Theory" is the first of several tunes to feature some serious lead shred-work, not entirely unlike the "guitar-hero" stylings of perhaps a Satriani or Vai. The title track has loads of quirky fx thrown on top of a steady kind of funk backdrop, somewhat Ozrixian sounding, though they screw around with a different kind of weird experimental rhythm-shifting later in the track. The "Planetary Management" variations are my favorite with their grooved beat, spaced-out keyboard lines and heavy drum fills. The synth-sequences remind me of Quarkspace. I hear synth techniques on this album that I haven't heard in a long time, like this kind of blippy jazz-agile lead-playing utilized in "Renucleated". The closer "Challenge Responsibly" is a wild climax of manic sped-up bass-loops and synths galore. Kinda sounds like something the Vas Deferens Organization might have pulled off. With 70 minutes of somewhat homogenous material here it's probably not to be wholly taken in one sitting, and with some of the variations bordering on superfluous, certainly some material could have been chiselled off. Not always utterly fresh, but at times invigorating.
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Reviewed by Chuck Rosenberg