Konstrukt and Keiji Haino – A Philosophy Warping, Little By Little That Way Lies A Quagmire (Live)

Karlrecords

A Philosophy Warping, Little By Little That Way Lies A Quagmire documents the second collaboration between Konstrukt and the Japanese avant-garde / noise icon Keiji Haino. This live manifestation, captured at SalonIKSY back in December last year, (and confusingly carrying the same title as its studio sister) is a meaty two-track beast that makes you envious you missed out on witnessing it in the flesh.

An injury of interjective angles, and Punch and Judy slaughterings, “Into A Trap Surely So Elaborately Laid Air Has Entered And A Splendid, Beautiful Monster Now Swims” niggles in post-rock posturings as those stalking drums are set upon by shard-shimmered guitar. The saxophonics picking up the argument in combative shrieks, braised in tasty licks of electronics until it feels like an aircraft rushing to the ground, then pulling up at the very last minute in a surprise R2D2 squelchiness (maybe generated from Haino’s palm surfing electro-magnetic devices). A drama the crowd go wild for as their appreciation is cheekily kidnapped, limbered into sci-fi tapers of peaking Oramatics that katabolically collide into the second half of the first side, kicked into a hornets nest of mirrored kinetics.

Yeah, some rather excellent baton passing going on here. The accumulating narrative darting between everyone involved, the air vibrates with tasty agitation, then spontaneously detonates. The two drummers, Berkan Tilavel and Erdem Göymen, eating into that hunger, Umut Çaglar furnishing the flux in surfy extras, with Korhan Futacı and Çaglar phonically counterpointing in tangled bouquets. Nice to see the master of the extreme Haino isn’t hogging the limelight, but knitting within there, chaotically grabbing at opportunity when it forms, throwing in his distinctive freakouts of guitar and voice into the mix. An enjoyment that is infectious, and one the band more than match in reflected intensity.

This is such a satisfying listen — a cliché(less) canker that gets right under your skin, oozes with rewarding shapes and tortured rhetoricals, tungsten white flashpoints that chew on fevered decision. I want to use the jazz word, but the textural tapers here are too primal to be affixed to its four-letter prison. Having seen Konstrukt twice and both times been stolen away by their promise, this more than matches expectation, if not slips beyond as the greasy spectres of sax rush on though, rythmically routed in percussive energies, escalating tensions that physically explode in fervid colour that more than matches the thermal imaging abstracts of the cover.

The flipside “Excess + Analysis / Courage =” is even better. A weird resin-soaked saxophone, staggered in Derek Baileyesque slants of guitar and spurty electrics and midge-like splutterings that abruptly flicker, fight amongst themselves to smooth into a deliriously dark journey that has a soupy radiophonic feel. Again the unity here is fluid, spherically rushing you with a Watashi Dake-esque oddness.

Those silvering frets dealing out an eerie otherworldly quality as Haino samurai(s) his syllables on upturned scatterings of drum, shimmering cymbal. The guttural sax scraping at the implied torment as the electronics goosh a soft exit to a cheering and wolf-whistling crowd. As the hubbub subsides, a gamelan shanty dusts in, contour curls, then fireflies a surprise Herbie Hancock scoop that quickly haemorrhages into some epic over-driven Oberon. A fiery and clatter-caked firework-ridden by Korhan Futacı’s voice as Haino’s shadow grows up the wall like a sonic scarecrow: wow doesn’t begin to cover it.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-