Imperial Animism

Boomkat Product Review:

Jay Glass Dubs' acclaimed jazz hounds Wild Terrier Orchestra return with a deadly new album of winding late night jams recorded as a score for Kalas Liebfreid's hybrid video work of the same name, hotly tipped if you're into To Rococo Rot, Tortoise, Holger Czukay, Craig Leon, Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble, Nala Sinephro, and, of course, Badalamenti.

In hot pursuit of their debut album for the Haunter label last year, Dimitris Papadatos assembles Foteini Korre, Laura Agnusdei, Ilias Livieratos, Kalas Liebfried, John Also Bennett, Dimitiris Koulentianos and The Tunnel Singers for extended sessions recorded in Athens, Munich, Paris, Brussels and Milan earlier this year. The sound is rich and dynamic, in places full of atmospheric nuance enhanced by JAB's bass and berber flute, and propelled by Ilias Livieratos' relentless, skittering rhythm section.

Chaotic shards of jazz and krautrock are disciplined and tamed by Jay's hands-on dubbing, speaking to contemporary music's cross-cultural rhizome in a vibrant trip that expands and contracts with heady, metaphysical ductility from the 14 minute sprawl of 'The Greedy Maws' to radical rushes of synth ecstasy in 'A Confident Leap', and glorious, imaginative soundscaping in the 'Dream Away the Hot Hours', thru to pulsating Reichian repetition, as inspired by African traditions and their endlessly open, trance-inducing forms, in 'A Silent Cloud of Dust.'

Of course, the music matches the mood and intentions of the Kalas Liebfreid's video work, which aims to demystify and negotiate racist and ecological ideologies of sculptor Fritz Behn's 1920's German Colonial-era sculptures of African "big game" animals. The richly psychedelic and swingeing results represent a careful reading and criticism of relatively recent European history and its imperialist attitudes toward cultural hegemony and hybridisation. It effectively tackles an enduring problem of unprogressive, staid attitudes toward what the colonialists termed the "miscegenation" of art and music, an attempt to fuel nationalistic ideologies that are still all too apparent a century later.