Henry Kaiser/Wadada Leo Smith/Yo Miles! - Upriver
All three Yo Miles! doubles are what I’d describe as marathons. It’s true that many of the electric Miles albums of the day were doubles, however these tributes are almost double the time of any of those originals, making a fair appraisal of any of these quite difficult. Especially with the two Cuneiform titles, these Yo Miles! sets are something of an immersive experience. The band uses the electric music of Miles Davis as a jumping off point and if this was the goal they’ve been rather successful with the formula. I listen to these like I’m in something of a trance. While electric Miles was obviously all about creating head space with abstract atmospherics, the Yo Miles! CDs open this up more with the modern technology and things feel even deeper. Like staring into a deep pool only to have a consciousness shift that puts one in the reflection’s place. In many ways, reviewing an album like this is like reviewing Robert Rich’s Somnium, it’s really hard to feel one could pay attention in a rational way through the entire length without ones mind expanding and contracting with the dynamics. There are lots of mellower moments on Upriver, these are like lucid dreaming or the transposition of subject and object, during these spaces my attention expands and the difference between the music and the environment reduces to nil. Rising from the caludron at different times comes the markers, the riffs and motifs of the electric Miles bands. These often act as the attention grabbers, you’re in unfamiliar waters and someone has cast out the liferaft. But then Yo Miles! enter those areas in the interstices. A familiar riff will give way to a digression or dialogue and all of a sudden one is both in the presence of the familiar and the new, wrapped together like yin and yang. Such a hallucinatory flow means that every listen you remember a different dream or two, different ones from prior experience. When I listen to Yo Miles! it feels like you need a good three hours, possibly a good 10 or 20 minutes just to let the effects of the listen to absorb.
Radio Massacre International - Emissaries
Radio Massacre International lost me a little bit, partially in trying to work through their mostly inferior CD-R releases, partially in that even the last few of their silver releases weren’t as strong as the band’s opening salvo of releases: Frozen North, Republic, Borrowed Atoms, etc. It’s made it so I’ve missed a couple of their most recent releases, but Emissaries, their first for Cuneiform records, is definitely their best since their initial releases, it’s just about everything the doctor would order for those having 70s Tangerine Dream withdrawals. What’s neat about RMI is that even though it’s kind of easy to place them in the Berlin school, they’ve had far more time than TD had during the 70s to really fulfill the implications of sequencer driven music, from the surging nature of the rhythms to the platform those rhythms give to soloing and improvisation. In fact, the guitar playing on this release is as strong as it’s ever been. I’d love to draw attention to where it does this the best, but with all RMI albums and the style in general, the impact of these surging, high energy moments is strong due to the slow, gradual build ups. RMI are total pros at this, they’ve managed to take one niche in electronics and refract it through the prism of their imagination into more colors than one would have thought possible.
Eroc - Eroc
It’s baffling in a way that during a time when Brain records was putting out a number of excellently produced albums that this solo by the Grobschnitt drummer, a solo that sounds very much like a DIY project, would have been released at all. In the modern world where all it takes is a good bit of money to come up with one’s home recording equipment, something like this is a dime a dozen now, but back in the 70s it seems rather quirky. There’s really no way to sum up this short album of Eroc’s work, some of it could be described as electronic (there’s even some very Oxygene/Equinoxe-ish synths at work here) while others sound more like something Sensations Fix or Riccardo Zappa might have done, with a more guitar-based sound. It all leaves me rather blah, aside from the quirk factor there’s not a lot of music here that agitates, surprises or comforts.