Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark – Screen Off

paal-nilssen-love-ken-vandermark-screen-off-cd-pnlok

CD – PNL

Since 2002 Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ken Vandermark on reeds have published seven albums of improvisational music. In addition, they have often worked with other great colleagues such as Peter Brötzmann, Terrie Hessels, Andy Moor and Ab Baars. Screen off on PNL Records is their tenth album, originating with the desire for a retrospective on their career. They had the idea to reconvert some old live performances (luckily retained thanks to You Tube and some nonofficial videos uploads). Understandably many of the clips were incomplete recordings with poor video quality. The idea to “embrace the limits of the format” and create a collage with the material found on the net wasn’t the easiest process. Assisted by Lasse Marhaug, a Norwegian producer with wide experience in noise, jazz-rock and extreme metal, the two musicians tried to find inspiration in experimental cinema, namely directors as Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and Tony Conrad, the generation of structural cinema of the 1960’s, whose experiments had interesting developments in the following decade in the United Kingdom. The audio elements came only from the basic recordings found on the web platform. Every clip is a 60 second edit: this has often originated some radical cuts, edited according to the feeling of the authors and without following a chronological order. From a strictly musical point of view, there is often a jump of several years in the improvisation process and this should have been very funny and satisfying for Nilssen-Love e Vandermark. Thanks to their original stylisation, they created a celebratory, vital and enjoyable document, very engaging in its abstraction. If Lasse Marhaug is on control, we can be sure we will receive some surprises. He goes beyond all the clichés about the lack of “conceptualism” in the metal-noise improvisation world, since he is a musician who trespasses in other fields, in theatre, dance, cinema, installations and videos. This is a direct and original album that deserves a full appreciation, free from frills and perfectly structured.

 

Paal Nilssen-Love & Ken Vandermark – Screen Off