Speeding up the corrosive process or through slippier textures dousing intrepid waifs and strays in a consuming ‘Petrol Haze’, on their new album Ugly Euphoria the longtime Maranata duo of Dag Stiberg on alto and baritone saxophones and Jon Wesseltoft on electronics are joined by the searing saxophonist Martín Escalante, whose incendiary trio recording Katyusha a couple of years ago with Teté Leguía and Weasel Walter was variously compared to extreme metal, grindcore and noise rock or free jazz iconoclasts like the Machine Gun of Peter Brötzmann or Bäbi of Milford Graves plus the flaying sixties and seventies performances of one of their Japanese counterparts in Masayuki Takayanagi.
From the first moments of the opening track ‘Rust Assembly’, on Ugly Euphoria the trio abound in garrulous feedback with some jaw jabbering which sounds like a vocoder gone awry, all flailing and sputtering wires as the twin saxophones of Stiberg and Escalante are force fed through the sheer wall and bridled constraints of Wesseltoft’s electronics.
Stiberg and Wesseltoft have been fixtures of Oslo’s underground scene for more than two decades, with Maranata their outlet of choice though Stiberg is also capable of more conventional fare, as evinced by his contributions to a couple of other long-running bands from the variegated folk melodies of Now We’ve Got Members to the psychedelic pop of Mt. Mélodie, while Wesseltoft has collaborated with the experimental string players C. Spencer Yeh and Okkyung Lee plus his fellow Norwegian noisemaker Lasse Marhaug, who has contributed to the mastering and design of several Maranata records while also featuring on their 2022 split tape No Vacancy!
Stiberg and Escalante have collaborated once previously, on the self-explanatory Play Alto Saxes from back in 2013, a session which was recorded by Wesseltoft. From the Mexican state of Guanajuato and now based in Los Angeles while having spent time playing in Peru, Norway and Japan, doubling up as a photographer and filmmaker, Escalante has also featured alongside Otomo Yoshihide and the grindcore band Sissy Spacek typically making use of a modified alto saxophone whose sound makes him a perfect fit for Maranata, a skilled cacophony which might strike most listeners as anything but natural and certainly lies a long way from serene.
‘Coked up on coca leaves, bad beer and too much coffee’, the four parts of Ugly Euphoria accompanied by their track titles evoke frenzied and sometimes ludicrous images, like on ‘Petrol Haze’ where one might imagine a booted figure with unbuckled straps as they slip frantically in an attempt to dump gasoline over someone else’s vehicle, the flicker of their intended flames present in the second half of the extemporisation which is punctuated by stalled revs and moments of pure feedback.
Beyond their most scabrous peers in the free jazz and noise scenes, ‘Ambulance Riot’ which is at once lighter and more disorientating, at least in its opening moments, is redolent of Lou Reed’s enfant terrible Metal Machine Music, which the rocker once explained with reference to the sustained tones of La Monte Young and the computer-aided compositions of Iannis Xenakis while claiming that the album was ribboned with classical symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven, to the raised eyebrows of some critics.
On the other hand as saxophones squall and seek out some semblance of melody between fraying ends and staticky bursts of distortion, ‘Ambulance Riot’ which might evoke some rabid pandemic outpouring or the paramedics themselves on a rampage also brought to my mind the cartoon vision of a hyperactive squirrel busily caching away their nuts.
Then the title track proves more jagged and fragmented, a runaway logic of short phrases with the electronics ceding and stuttering to give the horns a little more space, before a few submerged foghorn blasts herald the middle section. From around the ten-minute mark Wesseltoft’s lashing electronics settle into a throbbing, forge-like pattern and there is even room for a few trumpet fanfares amid all of the seeping and scraping textures.
