Snap, crackle, pop go the laptops. An oversimplification at best, yes, yet in reality, this is a timely reissue of a seminal 'supergroup' session of improvisers that sounds every bit as good in the new decade as when first hewn in the previous one. All five players' pedigree was beyond reproach in 2000, and, much like fine wine, their vintage has aged magnificently with time. To the untrained ear unschooled in the art of digital minimalism, laptop calligraphy, guitar re-contextualization, and overall electronic gimcrackery, these original sessions (augmented here, all in re-mastered form, with the addition of two previously unreleased pieces) demonstrated how electroacoustic improv could be a galvanizing listening experience long before a good chunk of it lapsed into ignominious flaccidity and barren idealism.
Ambarchi and Rowe are credited as the lone guitar-smiths here, the additional three members of the fearsome five working their computers' mojo, but anyone familiar with all the respective musicians surely acknowledge that collectively, there's a whole lotta processing goin' on. As both parts of the expansive title tracks illustrate, who does what is largely immaterial: the ear chooses to focus more cogently on the what instead of the who. The what that emerges from the vast tabletop of computer banks is a veritable forest perilous of incandescent blips, scuttling digital hiccups, nettle-like thrash and thrush, bits of discarded noises, plinks and plonks slashing through broad swathes of inimical undergrowth. The twenty-plus minute expanse of "Tea 2" eventually coalesces into deep pockets of wind gust and drone, effectively blanketing out the hasty generalization that most EA music is nothing less than a conglomeration of squeaks, squeals and grunts. In fact, listening to this music shorn of context, the entirety of it sounds — dare it be said — 'composed', even painterly so, which speaks volumes about the concentrated ability of the attendant artists.
The amusing bents of "No Title" betray more unlikely sensibilities, that of 'humorous' stripes invading the often ultra-serious environs of improv. Amid insectile abrasions from Rowe's guitar, the other three splash various horizontals beads of color across the spectrum, sounds that alternately trill, holler, warp, and fan out across particularly haunting (and haunted) landscapes — it's the Barron's Forbidden Planet legacy crossing decades and genre barriers in the erection of categories bracingly new and still unnamed. Both "Live Tea Parts One & Two" bare little recognition to their predecessors, other than even more gregarious hues and shades splayed out in even denser, more striated layers of aural cleavage. Much has been made of laptop music being too diffuse for its own good, too enamored with its own technological hubris and ingrained taxonomy — this bunch trash such notions so convincingly you'd think they damn near invented such orthodoxies themselves.
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Darren Bergstein 2010-02-13
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