Unstable Ensemble - Embers

Family Vineyard 37

I once observed a father comfort a screaming child by having him listen to the dial tone. I was reminded of this about a third of the way into “Everything Vibrates,” the opening track on Unstable Ensemble’s third full-length, as guitarist Jason Bivins does a picture-perfect dial tone impression. I’m only certain it wasn’t authentic because the upper partials morph and swell, ultimately dominating the texture. There is something innocently exploratory in the gesture, a directness that encapsulates this disc and the band’s current approach to improvisation.

Over the course of its six-year existence, UE has undergone radical sonic changes to complement several personnel shifts. The music has evolved dizzyingly from the earthy immediacy and primal jazz-tinged noise of 17 ways, past the pointilistic but melodic peaks and valleys on Liturgy of Ghosts toward a kind of theatrical expressionism—sparse in the rhetoric of Eurofree improv but offering up refreshing glimpses of good old American post-rock. Embers is an album of gradualities, and while it certainly charts a new direction for the band, it also brings the diversity of the group aesthetic into sharp focus.

Take the beautiful title track, a two-minute gem that speaks hauntingly of jazz past and of things to come. The two percussionists (Ian Davis and Matt Griffin) clatter, roll and brush-stroke while Bivins lazily strums uhr-chords, distorted at their roots and droney in subdued early Pelt fashion. Saxman Marty Belcher glides along providing proto-cool and entirely appropriate anecdotal evidence, while behind it all, Eric Weddle’s no input mixing board can be heard humming and sizzling, giving the proceedings a strangely futuristic feel, as if we’re hearing a Wes Montgomery group long after apotheosis or decay.

On the flipside, “Better up North” chugs violently into life, Weddle staking out spacious but starkly rhythmic EAI ground. Bivins follows suit, distortedly creaking the ascent and joining the percussionists in some strangely militaristic pattern interplay. Only Belcher seems out of step here, speaking the outmoded melodic language of Liturgy until he is forced in line as the group erupts into a free-jazz march-squall. Here again, Weddle’s electronics are perfectly deployed, nauseatingly high frequencies only enhancing the vibe.

It is impossible, undesirable, to do verbal justice to the in-concert spontaneity captured on this disc. The two epic tracks work along similar lines and although they take longer to develop, concentration reveals new gestures on each listen. Topoi emerge and sublimate in stratified blocks, often with blurred edges, only to be subsumed again by the not unfriendly silence that pervades much of the disc. Apart from demonstrating Family Vineyard’s increasingly broad sonic palette, Embers is without question UE’s strongest and most coherent statement to date.

~ Marc Medwin