I have this thing with free jazz where I tend to enjoy it live but have less time for it on record. By and large something gets lost in translation, or the live situation means there's nothing else to concentrate on and the sound is large and physical. This set though -- it's got everything you'd want.
Daily archives: 19/06/2024
4 posts
...Covid restrictions kicked in and this album became a game of two halves, with ideas and basic tracks batted both ways across the ocean. To make it more interactive, both parties recorded over the same period of time and it was taken in turns who would lay down the initial ideas and who would then react to those. The album was intended as a commentary on the increasing role AI plays in entertainment and ironically, the enforced separation has played into humanity's hands.
We meet our protagonist, the hulking mountain man Sensaku (played by legend of Japanese wrestling, Keiji Muto), as he reaches Tokyo from his home in Hokkaido, intent on finding his vanished fiancée who came to the city to study. Here he roams the junkyards and dive bars, finding himself stumbling into a subterranean world of modern-day gladiatorial combat that he must explore if he is to ever find his love. In amongst battling people to the death, he meets an opera singer no longer able to sing (Michiru Akiyoshi) and the two begin to roam the city together.
Of that initial flush of '80s/'90s noise guitar bands, the Telescopes have done the most to leave their history far behind, ploughing an awkward distorted furrow that somehow turns up gems with every release, their bittersweet melodies hidden beneath ever deeper beneath layers of shimmering murk. I like Stephen Lawrie's attitude towards them; seeing himself more as a guardian of the name rather than it being about him. He channels ideas and uses whomever may turn up to realise those sounds.