Three of the most intrepid improvisers in the game – the drummer Max Jaffe of the refracted art rock band JOBS and the James Brandon Lewis power trio, the Darkside guitarist Dave Harrington, and the saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi who has teamed up with everyone from his fellow squallers Camila Nebbia and Marta Tiesenga and the percussionist Tony Lugo to the immigrindcore collective Chepang and the metal-singed noisemakers Agriculture and Samuel Goff – scrabble for land on the Californian experimental outcrop AKP Recordings, with an exercise in deep listening which was recorded on the first afternoon of their coming together as a trio.
‘Staring Into The Imagination (Of Your Face)’ which opens the album Speak, Moment finds the trio ambling down a trough valley like the memory of a glacier, embracing a lazy day adorned with vestiges of the past, or pondering marketplace bric-à-brac as Shiroishi’s saxophone shuffles down alleyways while loosely carrying the melody, Harrington playing loping, rambling guitar lines while Jaffe on the drums lingers in the background, summoning a sort of languid kineticism which slowly animates its surrounds. Fittingly for a record with such a Nabokovian title, butterflies flutter through each scene while the trio stay keenly in the present, playing with a clarion consciousness which harbours fond remembrances in the manner of flashbacks.
‘How To Draw Buildings’ rumbles forth with a little more grit and force, characterised by drum rolls and plangent guitar lines with overtones that whittle the wind. Picking up the tambourine, Shiroishi sounds like a succession of birds as they burst and then flock out from variegated trees. ‘Dance Of The White Shadow And Golden Kite’ meanwhile is an arabesque, the shifting sands of Shiroishi’s saxophone giving way to a wild water rapid with a percussive froth and foam and the occasional punctuating kerplunk. The relatively brief ‘Ship Rock’ serves as a free-funk freakout which resolves in scorched embers, while ‘Return In 100 Years, The Colors Will Be At Their Peak’ is a dazed and staggering march, as Speak, Moment draws to a bluesy close amid loping horse-shoe percussion and skronking horns, a stalled engine leaving Jaffe, Harrington and Shiroishi stranded out in the wilderness as they loop the bend and embark on the long route back home.
