David Torn - Prezens

ECM 1877

Guitarist David Torn’s compositional roots in the Downtown NYC cut-up culture of the 1980s crop up all over this recent ECM effort, his first of the label in over two decades. He enlists the talents of three-quarters of Berne’s Science Friction to help bring his fertile, if sometimes seemingly schizophrenic, ideas to life. Texture proves just as important as line in Torn’s sound collages. “AK” has the sweaty feel of Cellar Door Miles, Taborn reeling off a hard funk line on Hammond and Rainey doling out a funky series of fractured skeletal beats. Torn’s guitar morphs from relatively clean blues lines to heavy metal riffage and back. Not exactly the sort of stuff one expects to hear under the ECM banner. Berne threads a rasp through his vertical blues spouting, punctuating his alto cries with shrill pops. Electronic processing adds another disorienting element at instruments suddenly subdivide into static crackles and fuzz.

The esoteric vocal tracts that lace through several tracks are a bit beyond my comprehension and more of a distraction than an advantage, but the stochastic musical aspects of this project are pleasing throughout. “Rest & Unrest” definitely falls in the former category, with a mantra-like phrase repeated and picked apart across a watercolor wash of vintage sounding electronics. The opening strains of “Structural Function” sound like Bernie Worrell blended with bits of Vangelis, Berne’s surprisingly cool-toned alto weaving above a vista of coruscating keyboards and sampling. Rainey brings the fractiousness, his brittle staccato beats gaining even greater divisiveness via Torn’s ubiquitous processing, itself an aspect that exhibits all manner of funhouse mirror approximations of the musicians in real-time. Torn adds even more with a punishing spate of guitar shredding and the tranquil tones of the opening minutes are all but forgotten. A weird electro throwback, “Bulbs” once again features the foursome at full density, jumping from one idea to the next with caffeine-addled intensity and finishing with another prog metal pie fight. “Sink” is similarly chopped up and features some of Berne’s most flipped out playing of the date while “Neck Deep in the Harrow…” bounces Pachinko-style through a “drums ‘n’ bass” obstacle course beset with flanging guitar explosives. Synth strings, acoustic bottleneck picking, Indian percussion converge in a loose raga rhythm on “Miss Place, The Mist…”, proof once gain of Torn’s unmitigated desire to tear listener preconceptions to shreds.

A key ingredient for appreciating this stuff seems to be a willingness to give oneself over to the reality of Torn’s relentless intractability. Attempting to draw a map mid-piece almost invariably results in abject failure. To some, such musical capriciousness will probably smack of glaring conceit and not seem worth effort expelled. Unexpectedly, I lean more toward the other side of the spectrum and have found myself returning to Torn’s world more frequently than I thought I would.

~ Derek Taylor