Fine free improv rattle and toot from three sparkly & spiky players on Barely Cool (PFMENTUM PFMCD090) – the trio are Franziska Schroeder, Marcos Campello and Renato Godoy.
Tune in for an entertaining and lively mix of glorpy saxophone from Schroeder and crazy guitar work from Campello, propelled along in an engaging awkward non-rhythm by Godoy’s trippity percussion. Some may enjoy the lively and crowd-pleasing hot workouts such as ‘Throws’ where Campello doesn’t so much strum as stab his guitar, provoking it into delivering funky aggravated punctuation to Schroeder’s liquefied rootles, which emerge like plastic dayglo squiggles dipped in glue. Others may like to get lost in the smoky, quieter sojourns such as ‘Rubber Tongue’, where the trio wander for days in a desert of abstract contemplation, ruminating on hidden eternal truths.
Franziska Schroeder is a music theorist who studied at Edinburgh and has published widely in various renowned journals; she’s also played alongside a number of notable musicians, and we heard her most recently in the company of Han-Earl Park. Experimental guitarist Marcos Campello comes to us from Rio de Janeiro, and has a number of releases available on his Bandcamp page, many of them decorated with covers printed in acidic colour schemes. Hearing his solo work might be a better way to engage with his wild guitar playing; I’d recommend Bamsa as a good place to start. In this trio and on this record, his primitive tones and energetic style gets a little buried, and he seems a shade too willing to defer to the “star” saxman. Fellow Brazilian Renato Godoy started his career playing in rock groups in Rio, but since joining Chinese Cookie Poets and other improvising combos, he’s starting to pattern himself after the templates established by Milford Graves and Sonny Murray. From 26 October 2015.