Austrian trio Teleport Collective here with A Monolith’s Dream (COL LEGNO BCE 2LP 16016), an entire double LP of their instrumental discursions…keyboard player Aaron Maria Steiner is joined by drummer Michael Naphegyi and bassist Joachim Huber.
At four sides, there’s a fair bit of music on offer, but they like a wide canvas on which to express their musical fantasies, which veer from a sort of cinematic sci-fi soundtrack thing, to tasteful fusion jazz noodling, with by-roads in the area of La Düsseldorf and Camel. The science fiction thing seems to blight a lot of players lately; is everyone fed up of the modern world and can’t wait to discover a better future? Teleport Collective are certainly hoping for a “posthuman” existence, a prospect that doesn’t thrill me much, but they make it seem positively comforting with their elegant chords and poised, mannered plinkling. A narrator by name of “Desert Survivor” is roped in to recite spoken-word portions of sides A-B, intoning excerpts from an imaginary diary set on an imaginary world. This particular vision doesn’t quite come into focus, but alludes vaguely to dreams, sandstorms, memories, and a world where our all our excessive consumerism and materialistic ways has finally led us to realise “the uselessness of things”.
There might be a strong message we could support lurking in among the languid sentences, were the music not so bland; the jazz-esque noodling and pastel chords seem to carry on completely oblivious to the implications of this sketched-in dystopia, and the half-baked attempts at emitting unusual electronic noises fall flat. The trio, who used to perform as Killah Tofu and made a couple of “jazz-funk-soul” records in Vienna, are described here as “electronic jazz”, but as usual with many contemporary musicians, one genre is not enough to satisfy them, and they also want to capture flavours of movie soundtracks, hip-hop, and dance beats in their sweep. (01/11/2024)