HOTOTOGISU & BURNING STAR CORE - s/t

"Hototogisu, the duo of UK experimentalist Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Sunroof et al) and New York-based-guitarist Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph/GHQ), are all about impact, about taking the physical aspect of sound and hallucinating it to the point of abstraction, so much so that for all of the complexity of their music it often sounds like its standing still, simply hanging in the air and vibrating without anything approaching a plot to bring it to a point. By contrast, Burning Star Core, the trio of drummer Trevor Tremaine, Robert Beatty on electronics (both of whom also play in Hair Police alongside Mike Connelly of Wolf Eyes) and C.Spencer Yeh on violin and electronics, are more overtly propulsive, usurping classic rock form via electronics and drums but still focused on momentum, on the jam as a form of structural gravity, on the unfolding of action via development over time. This all-improvised studio meeting is the perfect reconciliation of both tendencies, of Hototogisus obsessive layering of strata after strata of violently conceived noise and of Burning Star Cores epic, post-Kraut thunder-punk style. Bower has long been on record about his opposition to anything approaching dialogue in improvised music, favouring a senses-devouring simultaneity over anything that might pass for actual exchange, so its no surprise that there is little on this new record that sounds even close to conventionally improvised music. Instead, it feels more focused towards the zone where energy begins to spontaneously birth form, where the monomaniacal pursuit of the nowhere zone bears fruit in the shape of a music that transcends its constituent parts while being totally based around - and rooted in - the individual response to the moment. BXC play it ginchy and garage-pop right from the start, simultaneously inverting and amplifying Bower and Bassetts vertical constructs with drums that sound like they might have been lifted straight from the most flower-power parts of the Silver Apples back catalogue and bass patterns that are as tactile and rock-anchored as Cans Holger Czukay. To hear Hototogisus music given this kind of injection of dynamic energy makes them seem more obviously sourced in classic rock music than you might otherwise have guessed, with a dense, implosive sound that feels like a hyper-distilled take on all of rocks most outlaw aspects, the feedback that makes you feel like you could explode in a ball of electricity, the anti-gravity effect of heavy fuzz, the seductive, alien tongues. Its certainly the most garage band side that either of the groups have cut to date, albeit in the form of a Gnostic, post-acid re-think where the vibration is more important than the outer forms, where energized enthusiasm makes for a more fundamental guiding principle than verse/chorus/verse and where the only direction left is out. Which is another way of saying it feels genuinely bad-ass. In an era where even the best groups seem polite, pro, participatory, democratic, this is music that is disregarding in its overwhelming power, exhilarating in it irresponsible spontaneity. And in an underground scene where self-conscious notions of avant-garde and free improvisation have long displaced any concept of an intuitive rocks off-style, well, it feels like a re-connection to the source. So file this one closer to Kill City or Sticky Fingers than Persian Surgery Dervishes or The Black Album and feel the gravity of your whole record collection shift." - David Keenan, Glasgow, November 2008.