Antigravity
Brand: Blackest Ever Black
Antigravity is a new trio album from legendary trumpeter Jac Berrocal and two fellow travellers in the French avant-garde, David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. A lugubrious mise-en-scne in which ice-cold outlaw jazz meets musique concrte, DIY whimsy and dubwise studio science, all watched over by the lost souls and hungry ghosts of rock 'n roll The Berrocal/Fenech/Epplay trio's first album together, Antigravity is a richly imagined universe combining original compositions and dtourned standards. Berrocal revisits his own signature piece 'Rock 'n Roll Station', which first appeared on his '77 LP Paralleles with chain-wielding, leather-clad wildman of British rock 'n roll, Vince Taylor, singing the lead, and Berrocal on mic'd up bicycle; here, the Frenchman takes the vocal reins. A barely recognisable interpretation of Talking Heads' 'The Overload' pushes beyond the bush of ghosts into a fourth world dread-zone of stalking drum machine rhythms, humid electronics and jagged guitar phrasing, while 'Where Flamingos Fly' reroutes the Gil Evans Orchestra's classic rendition through the seamiest back-streets of the 13th arrondissement; there, as on the trio's reading of 'Kinder Lieder', the mood is romantic, but stark, isolationist: imagine Chet Baker falling through the glacial sound-world of early PiL or Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter. Originals include the agitated Iberian psychedelia of 'Spain', and 'Panic In Bali', which begins in seemingly trad-jazz fashion only to swell into a cacophony of a gurgling electronics and fevered 'Lonely Woman' quotations. 'Solaris' is a swirling, suspenseful arabesque of whiplash guitars and Black Ark FX, Berrocal's trumpet hitting deep blue notes while his vocals are sliced and diced and tossed into a yawning void of tape-delay like Antigravity at large, the result is oblique, dissolving, forever out of reach