The combination of contrabass (double bass) with percussion and vibes triggers my curiosity. This is the second CD from PfMENTUM Records. I’ve heard some of the later ones before I hear this one, so I’m prepared for what ever might come my way. This also is the first issue I hear from this label without electronics. The music here is purely acoustical, and the tracks are many; forty-seven! However, thirty of the tracks are brought together under the title “30 Short Stories”, together making up almost eighteen minutes of the CD.
It’s apparent from the outset that these guys are able to make this a varied and interesting assortment with their purely acoustical means. The tracks differ a lot. Track 4, for example, called “Woody Sounds”, does convey a vision of chopsticks casually being tapped on a table in a Chinese restaurant while the guest is getting impatient with the slow service, until the rattlesnake rattle and the ominous contrabass puts you in a quite different setting of desert and threats to your health, but later on the music takes on a introspective guise, where the action is that of a child playing in the sand, completely concentrated on the spade and the bucket.
That is followed by a number 5, “Nomen Est Omen”, which hits another note completely, far out on the eastern limb, with slow misty Japanese rice paper calligraphy and vibes of a temple character that furthers the meditative tendency. It’s a pity that this track is so short, even though it maybe is the longest on the CD – 4:48 – because there’s much to draw on here. Very attractive!
Some of the tracks fit well into the modern – or is it post-modern? – jazz idiom, while most of the stuff is hard to place anywhere on the musical map, as the case is with the other issues of pfMENTUM. The music here is emphasizing the impression, the snapshot, the poet’s note on a napkin, the sudden view that opens a short moment as the train passes a clearing in the forest.
On track 8 flutes do appear, even though they don’t show up on the instrument list on the sleeve, and the voices of the musicians appear too. The track is “Funky Flutes”, and funky they are, as the yells and shouts of the participants blend with the train whistle sounds, in a humorous camaraderie.
Track nine – “Sound From Our Space” – opens with bird call sounds, soon switching over into a slowly moving apparatus, making its way down the carnival street in the early morning hours, hangovers and all, the streets full of paper and leftovers, an occasional hobo sifting through the garbage cans for sustainables. Early morning militaries on an exercise training routine in track 10 – “Like a Black Riverbed” - break up the tired carnival gang with their forced force, applying their fast and determined percussion, and another day begins in Shitville, U.S.A. while the gulls fly up and spread out over the harbor, making dirty remarks to each other over the doings of humans.
This is a musical and fun CD, not quite exhausting the possibilities of the combination of the instruments, if one thinks about the way for example Iancu Dumitrescu uses the contrabass, but Oz and Giger has made an effort that is interestingly pleasant and which gives short, passing loop-hole insights into a very interesting and creative act.
