Trumpeter Peter Evans and drummer Weasel Walter already have already amassed half a dozen recordings over the past ten years. Do you need more? If the outcome was more of the same, they’d be the first to tell you no. While both men maintain a prodigious level of productivity, neither is satisfied with mere repetition. Make your point, and make the next one a little better, they might say. Or make it a lot better, or at least different.
So the concentration at work here goes far beyond the decision to boil down their collaboration to a duo. They spent just a few hours together one January day at Seizures Palace recording prepared themes, improvisations and noise. Then came the work of chopping, shuffling, layering and compressing that material into seven tracks. Once it was done, they cut it all back down, and then cut it back again. Each piece splits from within, bursting with the sort of pressure that comes either from being one of a species that must shed its skin or die, or by people with a shared commitment to making intense sounds in real time. Just to be clear, Walter and Evans are not critters breaking out of an egg or an exoskeleton; they’re humans breaking out of their shared history of extreme improvisation, determined to turn it up one more notch.
“Yellow Stainer” kicks off the record with dueling metronomes panned hard left and right. The differences in their time signatures create pockets of space that open and close at uneven intervals, and a pair of Evans / Walter duos take aim at those spots, shooting quick blurts and bashes that must never touch the outer edge of their targets. On “Satan’s Boletus” selective amplification and comprehension blow another improvisation up like digital magnification; the sound you hear, ladies and gentlemen, is not what was played but the way it was pixelated. Tracks of horn noise press upon tracks of fast drumming on “Sulfur Tuft,” which will push you to the wall like a blast of some heavy metal mutation that is unfit for normal life but too vigorous to die.
Piece follows piece, each named for a mushroom of escalating lethality, and it would hardly be in the spirit of the enterprise to simply name each one’s contents and methodology. Besides, if you go the album’s Bandcamp page there’s already a video that’ll do that for you. So let’s just acknowledge that we haven’t even gotten to the exploding marching band or the black hole implosion segments, suggest that you really ought to hear them do it through speakers big enough to handle a bit of destruction, and praise the duo for delivering not more of the same but more.
