Bryan Eubanks & Jason Kahn
Drums Saxophones Electronics
RUSSIA INTONEMA int013 CD (2014)
Jason Kahn & Bryan Eubanks’ Drums Saxophone Electronics sports a title which does the dirty work of listing the instrumental sources so you don’t have to. Convenient, yes; and, furthermore, indicative of a generous spirit that abideth and only becomes more manifest as you frizz the disc into the appropriate slot and the aforementioned do their respective things with the previously listed. Kahn, as you may be aware, is the percussionist, Eubanks the electronical-Saxophonist.
So and thus and then as it spins, Kahn’s limber limbs in whirlwind windmill motion clatter in a corner and thud softly underneath emphasising sprung membranous rotund qualities of his drums and fizzing metal rains of his high frequency cymbals’ agitation free. Subtle tone-weaving from Eubanks’ saxophone/electronics set up meshes with the frequencies in the upper registers, scintillating yonder stereocilia before dropping some Hz and taking aim at the trunk and gut areas to softly tear and rapturously rupture the fabric of the sound in delightfully immediate and un-ostentatious ways.
Thee document doth partake of a most appealing clarity and indicates body/space human activities in a simple yet roomy, electronic, dynamic, spry, playful, subtle, muscular, bouncy, nervy manner. Yielding skins, pressing drumheads with beaters, pressing fingertips to physical materials, warm-blooded, loosely clasping at a clattering of pots, with a sympathy for materials and what’s (if you’ll excuse the expression) to hand a twinkling of the wonder of a cosmic Kitchen-Sync. Sax-a-groans, wisps of unadorned feedback ring the room, patters of percuss, and like the presence of the instrumentalists, intuited but (you see) not pictured, as such (this is an auditory medium, folks) there pulses a deeply implied melodicism in the surrounding aura that invites the listener (that’s you) to kick back and soak it up in an integrated, trans-Cartesian, holistic, multi-pointed, live-action, real-time kind-of-way which elicits a whole-body pleasure response. D.H. Lawrence’s solar plexus could dig those kicks. Foist and foremoist. Which is to say, it’s fun, more immediate than you may or may not expect, and although possibly abstract in one sense, is the opposite of abstract in many important others.
Verily, far from ascetic renunciation through instrumental reductionism sans concurrent mental expansionism ‘tis a thoroughly wide-eared and embracing sound due to nimble fascination with innate qualities and potential of instruments meeting humans to generate sounds that travel in air. No sour grapes involved, but an intoxicating draught of water and sunlight, clear, infinitely subtle and intimately linked to life n’ living, making noises n’ listening.
THOMAS SHRUBSOLE