Tom Rainey’s drums, flickering cymbals and hardware add cardio to the vascular as the album’s opening track, Any Breathing Organism, slowly coalesces; Laubrock enters on tenor sax with a strikingly bright flourish as Rainey gives her the red carpet cymbal treatment in the background. With its tantalizingly enigmatic textures, much of this ten-minute tone poem of sorts, a launching pad for leaping and diving sax (Laubrock joined by Tim Berne on alto), is closer to Japanese folk music or indie classical than it is straight-up jazz.
The band picks up the pace with a restrained suspense as the slow, tersely melodic exchanges of Homo Diluvii get underway: Ben Gerstein’s trombone-fueled doppler cadenzas enhance the Lynchian mood up to a chatty go-round where everything goes more or less haywire. Rainey’s shadowy explorations fuel the creepy/fluttery dichotomy as Hiccups begins, Laubrock and Gerstein taking separate corners, building to an insistent, minimalist pulse that eventually comes undone as it rises. The way Laubrock orchestrates that heartbeat up through the octaves, and into a fullscale attack, is clever and fun. From there the group winds their way down to a long carefree but closely conversational free round.
Hall of Mirrors comes together slowly out of that with steady, minimalist exchanges and uneasy close harmonies…and then it’s over. Any Many opens as a squalling free jazz pastiche over diesel-engine tuba with deft polyrhythmic flickers, and a droll are-we-tired-yet false ending. The epic final cut, Hypnic Jerk comes across like a Burroughsian cut-up take on a more trad postbop sound, the band eventually meeting in the middle with a jaunty, shuffling flair before they wind it down to hazy atmospherics, then back to another frenzy. Those who need a steady 4/4 swing beat may find much of this challenging, but it’s a clinic in close listening and good teamwork from a crew who have a lot of fun blazing a path through knotty terrain with their eyes closed.