This is the follow-up to 1999's first Invisible Design chapter, master bassist Laswell's excoriation and investigation of various modes for solo bass guitar. Ten pieces of fairly economical lengths (the longest exceed seven minutes) find Laswell noodling, doodling and generally canoodling with his trusty weapon(s) of choice, in this instance a fretless bass and an 8-string bass, augmented/destabilized/wrung through various sundry FX. In effect, the erstwhile lo-end maestro solos with himself — 'course, Laswell's no novice, either on his instrument or as a composer in his own right, so where such an enterprise for others might have amounted to little more than sonic onanism, in Mssr. L's capable hands the bass assumes shapes, flavors, and textures of heretofore unheard-of dynamism.
Oh, and the pieces themselves are pretty dynamite to boot. Solo bass albums are generally dry, dreadful affairs (memory recalls no less a player of exemplary range and skill than Eberhard Weber releasing such a snoozer on ECM some years back), but Laswell isn't interested in just plucking the same tired strings. Today's technology, already legions ahead of the scant ten years past Invisible Design I, becomes a powerful tool that reconfigures and re-contextualizes (in addition to the inherent merits of overdubbing) Laswell's fave axe in ways both more ornate and seditious than you might think. He crosses many boundaries on these sonic excursions — elastic prog, caustic noise, pitch-black drone, spectral ambience — to such a high degree of variability that no two tracks sound the same. The opening "Xtrak" leaves little to the imagination, as its basso profundo amounts to Laswell gleefully whacking away at bits of his instruments' guts and sinew, trading arpeggios for slash, minimal "melody" for cognitive dissonance, a remarkable tour-de-force that lasts a too brief three minutes. The more liquefied atmospheres of "Quartz" finds the hues of those roughened chords caught in thick whirlpools of sustain and echo as Laswell spars with his own mirror image, the background haze growing thick with darkened rage and coarse splendor as he exeunts a Frippian progression of warped Crimson notes.
Elsewhere, when things get noisier, when he lets chaos supreme take over (as on "Iron Monger", a near two-minute exercise in primal distortion sounding like a noxious Painkiller outtake), Laswell the provocateur shines ever so brightly, and we realize he's just as capable of shaking the foundations as any other string-strangler worth his salt (remember, in addition to those Painkiller gigs, this guy once produced Motorhead). The closing "Darkness After" appears to grind all the previous influences, tics, and highlights into a blackened ambient mulch, Laswell letting his orbs of decay splatter into the vastness, yet a defining sense of disorientation isn't out of earshot — like his storied career, this is a guy whose compositions constantly keep you gloriously off-balance.
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Darren Bergstein 2009-06-22
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