Kris T Ambience

I had to tidy this one up a bit.  The version in Nightshift was bashed straight into an email on a tablet in a hotel in Leeds on deadline day, and I hadn't noticed that one sentence was about as long as the LP it was reviewing.

KRIS T REEDER – TIME TO FLY PART 2 (ELR XL Records)

Improvising trombonist Kris T Reeder has, we’re informed online, been “tokenised on the Ethereum blockchain”.  It takes us five minutes of searching to work out that this is not satire, just something we have no hope of comprehending.  Still, if it had been a wheeze it would have summed up this album, which embodies Vicky “People Like Us” Bennett’s concept of irritainment: art which is defined by its very ornery awkwardness.

Take opener “78 Free”, built on a chunky 4/4 bass drum kick which is a sloppily chopped loop, regularly dropping a fraction of a beat. This sums up the intriguing tension at the heart of the album, a clash between the jazzy expressiveness of free improv trombone, and cheap clunky electronica.  “Go On Then” pits rusty ‘bone tension cues against wildly oscillating synth in a style that might be called Noirstep, but might also be mistaken for someone testing the parameters of a Korg in a shop with an improv masterclasss in the corner, and “Pain Threshold” subsumes some relaxed hippo-parping notes in a storm of electronic chirrups and buzzes.

There are points where the album feels more sonically balanced, the interplay between Autechral beats and fluent trombone runs in “For Deep Experience” working well, and the title track’s SNES reproduction of a New Orleans second line groove possessing an ineluctable swagger, but generally this record is as frustrating as it is enjoyable.  But so much free improv has become a closed stylistic paddock decades after its inception, this deliberate oddness is actually a good thing, and we encourage all readers with a taste for the leftfield to seek Reeder out.  And if you work out what to do with a tokenised blockchain whilst you’re at it, be sure to let us know.