Latest record by Eclectic Maybe Band, perhaps their fourth, and it’s quite a doozy – once again demonstrating the remarkable talents of Guy Segers who writes all the material, co-ordinates the musicians, does the arrangements and recording, and plays bass and virtual instruments as needed.
Bars Without Measures (DISCUS MUSIC DISCUS 159CD) features an astonishing array of musicians – over two dozen at least – performing across 11 tracks of generously dense and rich music, which we can safely say has huge “crossover” appeal to listeners who enjoy jazz, progressive rock, and that odd strain of European “chamber rock” which surfaced in the 1980s and appealed to Chris Cutler when he was enthusing about it in the pages of the Recommended Records catalogue. As mentioned in previous write-ups, Eclectic Maybe Band is a triumph of process – it’s possible that a track will start life played by musicians in the studio, but it’s within the rules to add parts and overdubs after the fact, in an open-ended method that allows musicians to send in their contributions over the internet. In fine, we don’t know how much of an “assemblage” we’re hearing at any one time, but it’s not important – the results, always exciting, innovative, and full of unexpected surprises, are what count in the final analysis, as the prospector takes his nuggets to the assay office.
In his liner notes, Guy Segers does emphasise the importance of the internet to this continuing project, partly because in the “old days” it would have been difficult, expensive and time-consuming to get all these international musicians together into the recording studio for a session on a particular date. The possibility of digitising music, and being able to shepherd it around the world through fibre-optic cable, has thus been grasped as an opportunity to think on a grand scale, do something that was not possible before. But Segers stresses the important impulses that start it all off for him, as with all creative endeavours – he speaks, with some animation, of “music without stylistic restriction”, “a vast horizon of emotions”, something that “never reflects the same colour”. In short, it’s not about technology or fetishising computers, but about creating something new and beautiful. And in organising this “collective project”, one where he does not see himself as leader, Segers hopes to bring the names and the work of these musicians to a wider audience of listeners and journalists. This being the case, please peruse ye the credits to learn new names, or reacquaint yourself with familiar ones, from France, Belgium, Austria, the UK, and the USA. Rather ordinary sleeve art, but I suppose that image does convey something of the “rush” of digital data down the pipes of the world wide web. (Sept 2023)