JazzKLUB / Contemporary Noise Sextet / Motor Psychedelia - NOSPR

After a ten-year hiatus, Contemporary Noise has returned with the phenomenal album An Excellent Spiritual Serviceman. For all the affection that listeners feel for the group’s ground-breaking recordings from two decades ago, the new album may well be the finest work ever recorded by the Kaps brothers. It contains rather less improvisation (which is not to say that improvisation is absent, or lacking in significance), and rather more carefully conceived large-scale compositional structures. Some have described this music as the soundtrack to a film that does not exist. If so, it would have to be a fast-paced action film – or perhaps a work of science fiction, given the ensemble’s prodigious gift for conjuring new sonic worlds. The relentless rhythmic motor does not preclude mystery, and precision moves hand in hand with a psychedelic haze. Each piece from this new incarnation of Contemporary Noise feels like a small masterpiece: consistently precise, always hit the mark. And with all the vast experience of the ensemble’s members, their music still retains both youthful unruliness and pure joy of playing.

Tomasz Gregorczyk