Michel Kristof and Vinnie Paternostro-A Place You Could Not See. A Time You Did Not Know; Muteant Sounds, 2018

 

There exists a file on Disaster Amnesiac's desktop labeled "Blog Stuff". Within that file there are a handful of releases that I've not ever gotten around to reviewing. I suspect that for the most part this is due to the Event that started in 2020 and its cancellation of the culture that I was involved in. The recordings therein, and appreciation of them, were superseded by my forced involvement in the Event, subsequent personal decisions in the wake of the Event, and probably just general inertia to boot. Apologies to those from whom Disaster Amnesiac received music for review and never got them.....I'm working on it.......

........starting with A Place You Could Not See. A Time You Did Not Know from Michel Kristof and Vinnie Paternostro. Across six tracks of duo action, Kristof on guitar and effects and Paternostro on saxophone, drum machine, and Moog Mother 32 conjure up a suitably dystopian, doomy Jazz Fusion that is heavy on humid, claustrophobic atmosphere. Beats break and pound, saxophone wails atop, and strange atmospheric electronics simmer and swirl around them. A Place You Could Not See is quite the heavy listening experience; indeed it's a perfect soundtrack for our gloomy media world, obsessed as it is now with some war film unfolding in Eastern Europe. Disaster Amnesiac can envision people listening to these wild instrumental soundscapes as they tune in to our next new Collective Event. Hell, I can envision the tracks from this album being piped in to the cyber-steered battle goggles of the various fighters on the front lines in Kyiv or Donetsk or wherever else the various military industrial complexes will insist the people shoot ordinance at each other for "reasons". Yeah, the sounds on this album from 2018 perfectly encapsulate the mood four years later in time. The forbidding, sullen washes of sound on A Place You Cound Not See. A Time You Did Not Know, all mechanically driven and relentless, sound to suit the Next New Normal, coming to a battlefield near you, just perfectly. 

Its sonic shrapnel, sharp and explosive, might just do some damage to your perceptions, but, hey, you'll be able to walk away with your body intact. That's my hope for you, fellow human, anyway.........