MoonJune 2017
The Stone House
Rocking the joint to shake it, rattle and roll, proponents of improv get instant gratification out of triumphal telepathy.
Perhaps, a MoonJune state of mind is a reason why it doesn’t take more than a moment for various musicians, meeting for the first time in studio environment, to read one another’s mental chart and imagine an unplanned trip right away. That’s how this album came to be, from clean slate to a connoisseur’s palate, with four fusion-focused players creating magic in the spur of the instant, yet such immediacy brought forth more of a rock, as opposed to jazz, force. There’s a lot of the latter in the loose locking of Asaf Sirkis and Yaron Stavi’s rhythm section, but the guitar dynamics of Markus Reuter’s tapping and caressing the fretboard and Mark Wingfield’s picking and strumming produce riveting soundscapes whose existence feels transitional, if never feeble.
They can be tight as demonstrated by a “Sleep Walk”-esque twang behind “Four Moons” where bottom end howls and high register bristles with silver lining, although one shouldn’t go further than “Rush” to experience the lure of crystalline glide which is challenged when bass and drums bounce off its fragile surface and tie it into tension-filled knots of angular action. Darker still, “Silver” will show how funk may be simultaneously mercurial and ominous, unlike the oxymoronish stasis of “Fjords de Catalunya” that’s devoid of groove and full of portent, contrasting the tidal waves in “Tarasque” – the most vibrantly avant-garde, albeit magnetic, piece. And then there’s “Bona Nit Señor Rovira” to turn on the night and shatter a shadow of a tune to smithereens without releasing the listener from the grip of a meandering riff before it dissolves into a lava lamp-like lull.
Given the combination of artists here, their studio sojourn could go many ways; that it set on the route to troubled bliss is a wonder and a testament to the kindred spirits’ tremendous talents.
*****
