Roil - Frost Frost - Bo' Weavil - Weavil 42CD

The pianist Chris Abrahams is best known as a member of the Australian trio The Necks, whose new album, Mindset, sees them once more translate improvisation's confrontational processes into tasteful gamelan style drones. Abrahams' second collaboration, as Roil, with the drummer James Waples and the bassist Mike Majkowski, is a rougher, more intimate, proposition.
The Necks' vast waves of sound are abandoned for more conventional jazzy flourishes, virtuoso technical displays gaining listener confidence, which grind into an ambient minimalism, pounded single note passages framed with kinetic twitches, percussive rubble, and circuitous near-melodies.

(4/12/11)