Artist: Flanger
Title: Nuclear Jazz (Templates/Midnight Sound)
format: CD (non21)
date: 30.03.2007
Reviews
"Flanger’s Templates was trumpeted in these very pages ten years ago (in fact, Real Groove is quoted on the cover sticker as writing “It’s difficult to imagine a time when it won’t sound before it’s time”) and was regarded as a milestone for electronica, in that it took some well-worn jazz tropes and demolished them with an album full coruscating wit and playful invention. Flanger were/are a duo of Burnt Friedman and Atom™, two of the most iconoclastic, unpredictable and original minds to have applied themselves to the task of raiding and re-articulating the cultural dead-ends, the psychic interiors and granular physics of jazz. Heard ten years later, Flanger’s early work sits outside of the time in which it was created, though it sounds less a modern filtering of jazz than a very personalised inspection of fragments, all tied to a unique, rhythmically based compositional process. Originally issued on a Ninja Tune sub-label, the first two Flanger albums (Templates and Midnight Sound) have been edited down by Friedman to one album and renamed Nuclear Jazz (Nonplace), and outside of this rather inexplicable editorial interference, it’s still a remarkable listening experience, if rather alien for those looking for some ‘authentic’ heart-on-sleeve emotional release. Oh, and it’s fucking funny."
(Gary Steel, Real Groove, New Zealand 2007)
"(...) Nuclear Jazz is itself a
reconstitution of the Flanger catalog that started on Ntone and Ninja
Tune, compiling and editing 1999's Templates and 2000's Midnight Sound
into a mesmerizing hybrid of the organic and the synthetic that
simultaneously connects to and pushes away from jazz and the flora
where it forms the root (funk, acid jazz, jungle, trip-hop). Flanger
guides electronic manipulations and their own studio recordings down a
path to avoid repetition at most if not all costs. The opening glitches
and New Wave pads of "Music to Begin With 1" may suggest that the
album's about to go electro all the way, but the music suddenly expands
to recall the vibraphone of Ayers and Hampton, the keys of DeFrancesco
and Jimmy Smith. Much as one might try, any attempt to point to
specific influences on Flanger's lively drum and bass parts would be
fruitless as both are overtaken by clicks and cuts and, well,
drum'n'bass, especially in the front portion of Nuclear Jazz featuring
the Templates recordings. Witness "Short Note with a Few," which in the
real world might be a six-minute high-hat solo, or the dub
transformation of "Full On Scientist;" you're never quite sure what's
been lifted, filtered, or played straight through. That camouflage is
best worn on the second, Midnight Sound half. Flanger's recording
setting truly takes hold of them on the Latin stylings of "Bosco's
Disposable Driver" and "Midnight Sound" before they devolve into
digital noise and ambient improv, respectively, while "Nightbeat" and
"Human Race Race" are their takes on the spy-music exotic. The one
questionable abridgement: The duo's version of Miles Davis' "So What"
has been excised from this collection in favor of a solid but
ultimately tangential remix of Gak Sata's "Tangram." We can only deduce
the absence of the jazz standard is meant to confirm that Flanger
stands on their own and not on the shoulders of giants. Not "nuclear"
so much as "radioactive," Flanger's beginnings may not have been
explosive but their legacy should be a long, lingering one." (AB)
Press Info
10 years ago, in December 1997 Atom™ and Burnt Friedman teamed up in Santiago de Chile to compose "Templates". Atom™, also known as Señor Coconut, had moved life and studio to Chile in 1997 and B.Friedman flew in as part of his annual travel to New Zealand and Australia.
Equipped with few electronic production devices: sampler, sequencer and keyboard the duo managed to produce the entire first Flanger record "Templates" within one week only. On their search for the ultimate organic, non-repetitive sound scape they intended to blur the borders between "real", "fake" and "hyperreal": Songs may start with an accumulation of shortest possible noise fragments derived from self-made instrumental samples - programmed with the deliberate avoidance of repetition - developing into the acoustic sound of a real jazz trio playing live. "Templates was a simulation of small group jazz. What sounded superficially like real time playing was revealed to be samples deployed in a psychedelic demonstration of Friedman´s Nonplace ideas, undercutting the record´s apparent virtuosity and any assumptions about the meaning of the word 'genuine'," reviews The Wire magazine in 1999.
"Atom™ and Burnt Friedman found a place where they could indulge their sheer love of playing," as stated in the 1999 liner notes of the second album "Midnight Sound". They added the latin flavour wherever they could. "Not only their wealth of ideas but also their ability to 'humanize' the sound of samples, coupled with the funkiness of their music, is evident on this album. With electrically defamiliarized instrument set ups, 'Midnight Sound' ignores all the stylistic pigeon holes that critics so love squeezing musicians into. There seems to be nothing Flanger is reluctant to touch upon."
tracklisting
01 Intro 0:55
02 Music To Begin With 1 3:10
03 Music To Begin With 2 4:59
04 Endless Summer 4:54
05 Options In The Fire 3:12
06 Short Note With A Few 6:20
07 Studio Tan 6:00
08 Full On Scientist 5:50
09 Lata 5:47
10 Nightbeat 1 3:52
11 Bosco´s Disposable Driver 5:15
12 Midnight Sound 3:26
13 We Move 4:44
14 Human Race Race 3:53
15 Angel Of Love 3:26
16 Nightbeat 2 3:44
17 Stepping Out Of My Dream 5:43
18 Tangram 3:59 Flanger Golf Club Remix (bonus track)
total time 79:20 min