Musique Machine Reviews

From Musique Machine:

Broken Arm Trio – Self Tited
Broken Arm Trio is a mainly up-beat and very bassy sounding jazz trio featuring Cellist Erik Friedlander(solo & various John Zorn related projects) who also composed all the tracks here, Trevor Dunn( Mr Bungle, solo work & various Zorn related projects, etc) and Michael Sarin on Drums.

Ascanio Borga – Xenomorphic
Ascanio Borga cut his teeth playing guitar in noise rock bands, evidence of which rears its head fairly early into Xenomorphic, his new disk on the under-recognized Afe label. The (title) track starts off in an ambient neo-Eno vein and then splits off into a thumping one chord metal riff. It’s only metal in relation to the guitar tone actually. If the tone was different it could pass for a Krautrock motif because of the stuttering, repetitive rhythm. Borga augments the guitar pattern with other guitar noises, sometimes gratuitous soloing, tasteful percussion and a bevy of granulated background sounds. There also seems to be some bass, which sounds like the real deal, though it’s getting increasingly more difficult to tell these days, with the advent of digital music programming. Borga has a musical background, and the painterly quality of the aforementioned title track makes this very evident. He starts the piece with noise, subtly piling on each element, slowly building forward momentum, the caps it off with the same noisy background which began it.

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