French jazz drummer Peter Orins realised Dead Dead Gang (CIRCUM DISC LX019 / TOUR DE BRAS TDB90006cd) with the help of Maryline Pruvost, Barbara Dang, and Gordon Pym – and it’s quite some distance from the contemporary jazz music we normally hear from this fellow, sometimes recorded in the context of the TOC trio…he’s devised a very open-form, minimal framework of a composition, where the contributors of all the musicians are not only welcome but absolutely necessary in order to keep the piece rolling down its conceptual pathway. Spoken word, texts, percussion, piano, electronics and Indian harmonium may all appear sporadically, and in puzzling ways.
He’s doing all this in service of Jerusalem, a dense prose novel written by the UK polymath Alan Moore; I never read it, but apparently it’s an ambitious sprawl refracting time and space, and examining multiple details and incredible coincidences in the layered, overlapping manner we’ve come to associate with this very unique writer. Jerusalem published in 2016 has come to attract descriptions like “monumental”, as if critics were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of its verbiage (over 1200 pages), whereas Dead Dead Gang is far more modest and restrained in its scope. But then it’s not seriously attempting to be a musical analogue of the book, rather drawing specific ideas and influences from it. I suppose to get anywhere near emulating the scale of a book like that, you’d need at least a 10-CD epic production with orchestras, narrators, and split-screen projectors in an arena. In a way, this tiny chamber quartet is a much more endearing proposal. Where Moore can be scarily convincing in his authorly presentation of far-out concepts, the music here is generally rather uncertain and vague in tone; I liked the track ‘Prélude Infini’ with its hazy mumbling and muttering voices, but less keen me on the more declamatory moments such as ‘Up The Pub’.
Innovative and unusual release, cleverly evoking the time-travel elements and hovering spirits of the original text. (11/04/2023)