Decision Dream - Steamroom Variations

Red Toucan 9328

It tickles me to imagine that I’m hearing some futurist or alternate universe version of a Jimi Hendrix group when I listen to this manic outgrowth of the power trio. Well alright, maybe the freer moments of Hendrix at Woodstock meets a more reflective Fushitsusha. Anyway, it would have been easy for an electro-blowing session such as that on offer here to have deteriorated into shapeless noodling, but somehow, to group credit, I hear very little excess on this disc. In fact, repeated listening reveals Steamroom to be fairly frenetic but streamlined, transparent without loosing viscerality or power.

Recorded in one afternoon in London late this past summer, the platter’s basically one mammoth three-part suite with a brief coda for good measure. From the outset, guitarist Magnus Alexanderson, bassist Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and trapist Anthony Bianco serve up a mixture of drone, scree and clatter that manages order through constantly on-the-toes communication, all of which begins fairly softly with vaguely “jazz” inflections in drum timbre. Within the first five minutes though, the line between jazz and noise is straddled, which happens more and more frequently as the disc unfolds in slow jagged arcs. At one point, things die down to near silence, an astonishing and well-executed effect, but it is short-lived.

I don’t mean to give the impression that order is lacking here—it most certainly is not, but it usually comes in bizarrely interconnected loops, each one coming off like a microcosmic manifestation of the disc as a whole—organized asymmetry—and so the loops tangle and unwind themselves in perfect counterpoint to everything else roiling and bubbling in tandem. The drums are beautifully recorded, producing some fun spatial allusions if auditioned in “the sweet spot” and it’s often hard to tell bass from guitar, so effect-laden and inter-registral is almost every utterance. Do I even hear occasional delay on the drums—they’re remarkably dry otherwise.

Maybe, and despite my inability to articulate in kind, the best thing about the disc is just how clearly presented everything is. No matter how many levels of feedback, distortion and whatever else is piled atop the remnants of what I’ll jump right on out and call instrumental purity, the trio identity is refreshingly ever-present. This is commendable, and I look forward to hearing wherever these folks take music that I have no qualms whatsoever about labeling fusion.

~ Marc Medwin