Malaby / Dumoulin / Ber - Trees On Wheels

"This is one of the most beautiful and freshest albums I’ve heard in a long time. Strange beauty, beautiful strangeness... are we of this world, or are we strangers from a land that exists only in sound and of which music is the reminiscence?

Freshly delivered from the outer realms right into our ears is this collection of sonic snow-globes and origami postcards, courtesy of three master instigators, always-gorgeous sound-wizard episode-makers and crafters of many personae. Let us call them S, T and J. Their translucent selves speak in many tongues through all tenses and persons: First Second Third. Fourth is the one you don’t hear directly: the Director/Producer, the réalisateur, the one who makes it real and puts it on a reel. Let’s call him SB. He listens with his eyes, adjusts the angle and frame, lurks in the cracks and artifacts, it’s his movie unfolding your brain right now as if a magic lantern had thrown the nerves in patterns on a screen.

Too easy to overlook how many forms of courage it takes... First in the playing— how musicians come to phrase and hear and sound the way they do. The resistance, the impedance, the willingness to let the rubs create the flow and the synchronous ravel and unravel. The courage to let the form emerge from no-form and then to chop it up, slice it and not hide the traces of fabrication; to articulate splices and glitches, contaminations and concatenations of ear and waveform so the listener can jump straight into this aquarium or another with no transition. Or it’s all transition...

Layer upon layer, fold by fold, a room within a room is revealed within the room, a boom within the flutter, a wisp of sunlight caught in smoky glass just behind the eyeball.

Modes, nodes and monads collide and interpenetrate, as self-evident as a butterfly wing or a drop of pond-water under a microscope. Through SB’s anamorphic lens, a new tenor saxophone is born, as convincing as the transformation of one species of fish on a grid whose right angles if bent correctly produce another fish just as real whether it swims in an actual lake or in the ocean of your mind.

Electric eels have gigantic eyes that scoop the light out of the sky and feed it underwater to neon-lit flesh-eating flowers so they glow. Animals, plants and machines are connected to each other by neuronal canals, ancient instincts and pulsations. The jaguar has a micro-transistor in its eyeball. The jungle devours and replicates itself. Tree-trunks (on wheels) are stuffed with cables and wires, sap and ultraviolet fluids. Cyborgs roam with beating hearts and desires which are memories of the future.

More than a half-century ago in the other direction of Time, the disruptive imaginations and studio-craft of Teo Macero, Mingus and Miles had already revealed to us that the Word could be cut up and operated with percussive grafts and spinal transplants. O the hundred expressive edits of Pharoah’s Dance, O the many bubbles of Charlie Mariano serenading the Black Saint’s Sinner Lady through conflicting reverbs... And now, the mind-trips and many chromatic disturbances of audition offered to us on this silver disc. Have the kindness to feed it to your brain through good headphones, many versions of you will appreciate the meal.

Meanwhile, Agent Leibniz in his space-car chases replicants through a galactic Lincoln Tunnel to Alphaville’s peripheral space-ways and lands in the Zone. Hasn’t he been here before?

Beauty. Experience it."

Michaël Attias