Heule/Leguia/Rivera/Escalante-An Inscrutable Bodily Discomforting Thing

 

It's been a bit over four years since Disaster Amnesiac has heard from Jacob Felix Heule, but recently that silence has been broken by a couple of releases that the Oakland-based drummer has sent my way. Gotta say right off the bat that it's wonderful to hear from him as well as to hear what he's been up to musically in the interim. The first of two releases for review is An Inscrutable Bodily Discomforting Thing, featuring the quartet of Heule, Danishta Rivero, Tete Leguia, and Martin Escalante. Recorded while the latter two musicians, on bass and saxophone respectively, were on a 2021 tour stop in the Bay, An Inscrutable Bodily Discomforting Thing is a long form improvisational piece that's best taken in within one sitting, as that's the best analogue for what this configuration likely gets on to when up close and personal. The group sets off pretty much immediately into the jittery abstraction that characterizes so many freely improvised sets, and Disaster Amnesiac has wondered at the quickened listening on display within their dynamics. Clearly, extended thinking and its attendant musical performance is on display. Jacob starts the set off with what sounds like his stripped down, bass drum centered style, but as the set's duration unfolds he can be heard to be performing on a bigger set of drums. Within that former approach, lots of drags, scrapes, and scratches emerge; surely, these must have been coaxed not only from Felix's rig but also from those of Tete's bass and Martin's saxophone. Rivero eventually joins the fray and shows herself to be a skilled user of the human voice as musical instrument. Danishta is a classic Jazz singer in the sense that she uses notes that are either being explored or have been explored. It's certainly not a lazy approach to the craft. Eventually, a more jarring Noise territory is dipped into, full of brash and big and possibly unsettling zones. Disaster Amnesiac's perceptions have been pushed into those of a more Industrial bent by the over saturated, physically moving qualities therein. Lequia finds joy within an overblown, multiphonic aesthetic, very much in the loft style, and the group is not so much going into the void as they are immersed in a beautiful vortex of sound generation. The CD version of An Inscrutable Bodily Discomforting Thing is very limited, so fans of physical media will want to swoop quickly on this fine free energy blast of a document. Heule, Rivero, Leguia, and Escalante have delivered an album of perfectly expansive accelerated thought/music interactions.