Porter
Currently (and luckily) in a period of hyperactivity, Nate Wooley - the grey eminence of incompatible trumpeting - holds to his painstaking search for marketable lost causes in this, a disobedient trio with the gruesomely attractive cello-cum-electronics of Fred Lonberg-Holm and the humdrum-killing infection of bassist Jason Roebke. The comrades need no preamble to start stinging the ears in “Tacones Altos”, where the comparative oppositeness of registers becomes a pretext for cantankerous macerations of common sense, achieved by oscillating between the extremes of timbres with intolerant know-how. “Sans Aluminumius” (sic) is inaugurated by a fantastic series of raggedly dirty glissandos, then proceeds to mock the phobia of dissonance typical of formulaic improvisation by blowing the remnants of tone all around the place in a quest for sheer disreputableness, malevolent oxidation corroding the strings in an unprompted exhibition of low-budget anarchism.
“Southern Ends Of The Earth” is a meeting of Webern aficionados whose incorruptibility is tested by an undesired guest trying to sneak smoothly blown intimidations in the existing conversation; yet, at one point, the music sounds like psyched-out frogs commenting the insane practices of a Alfred Hitchcock-loving jazzbo. “Saint Mary” begins with micro-crickets and misbegotten parsimony, the squeaking qualities of the wood and the cunning behavior of the three exploiters at the basis of a surreptitious degeneration of instrumental configuration ending in friction-and-howl proficiency. The album is completed, in dilapidated glory, with “Anywhere, Anyplace At All”: drops of wretched electronics underlining an ungovernable sonic gossip, kind of a soundtrack for the attempted larceny in a depressing hole already visited a hundred times by other thieves. Nothing left to steal, those previous missives didn’t tell the truth, the song is over.
