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Equally at home with the discipline of composition and the tightrope of improvisation Blast (now Blast 4tet) have evolved a fluid, pointillistic, unfathomable but transparent musical language that seamlessly integrates - over very short durations - highly complex writing and very free ranging improvisation, allowing the two languages to merge and combine into a new kind of logical exposition that makes sense but can't be reverse-engineered into its component parts. This is a music that lives through detail and exposition; neither resolving into composition, nor able properly to be understood as improvisation...Basically, Sift privileges structures which juxtapose the superimposition of meters and a pungently angular approach to the phrasing. The deriving geometries — informed by a type of dissonance that will feel natural to whoever is experienced in this area — appear logically considered, transparent in a way, coherently articulate. This interlocking of different patterns and pulses — circular reiteration upon square foundations, instantly interchangeable tempos in the space of thirty seconds — is the essence of practically everything here, as symbolized by the temperamental succession characterizing "Fluke" which starts with a funky feel to throw players and listeners alike right into the arms of neurotic ostinatos, the whole slowed down by sparse clustery chords during the calmer sections. Throughout the program Blast emerge as a solid unit, not four separate entities: they never transcend the limits of instrumental intelligibility, Bruinsma's baritone probably the only color that might be seen as a tiny trademark in an otherwise compact palette made of semi-clean guitars, ever-focused bass lines, a brand of drumming that modifies the ensemble's physiological beat at the flick of a switch ("Swerves" being a nice example in that sense)....http://www.squidco.com/miva/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=S&Product_Code=11860
Private Dances (2004) is so hot, so longing with yearning, so lonely with the blues, so salacious in its undressing of the unsuspecting listener, that it could properly carry a Warning ! sticker. In six movements – sexy, sad, sentimental, sultry, saintly, swingin’. The pianist, Sarah Cahill, leaves you, the listener, with nothing – she took it all. This piece is what was going on in the mind of the guy at the end of the counter in the E. Hopper painting, Nighthawks...http://www.newalbion.com/NA137/index.htm
Superchunk, Majesty Shredding
McKendree Spring - TracksLP
