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AppleAn Apple A Day
Highly anticipated 2010 album from the German Progressive Metal band. The Seraphic Clockwork is a fascinating concept album, which not only shows the quintet's exceptional technical skills, but also highlights their impressive development as songwriters. The album sounds more multi-layered, Progressive and Metal-oriented than any previous Vanden Plas release.
Muhal Richard Abrams and Roscoe Mitchell are arguably the two figures most central to the birth and rearing of the seminal '60s collective the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The organization was borne out of Abrams' Experimental Band and the first standing group to emerge from it was the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble (later rechristened the Art Ensemble of Chicago). It seems a bit strange, then, that their careers have run such separate, while nearly parallel, paths. Both have worked deeply in the particular form of exploratory jazz that came out of the AACM through various instrumentations and structures for composing and improvising; however they've rarely done so together. Abrams plays on an early Art Ensemble record, Mitchell in some of Abrams' early ensembles. They recorded together (and apart) on the 1993 Black Saint release Duets and Solos, an album that didn't quite seem to gel into the meeting it should have been, and then with far more satisfactory results on Streaming (Pi Recordings, 2006), in trio with George Lewis. In short, their separately illustrious careers have overlapped only occasionally and with mixed results.Spectrum continues this unusual association (coincidentally, it includes some thoughtful liner notes by Lewis, reuniting the Streaming trio in a very different way). The album opens with a beautiful 12-minute duet that realizes the promise the meeting of these two improvisers holds. "Romu" is just plain lovely, a beautiful, unhurried interaction building slowly to a relative frenzy but never losing its center. The rest of the album will no doubt meet with varied reactions, but the duo piece alone sells it
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