EBSK

Secret highways / wobbly

3” CDR, Scarcelight

If you want to know what the abbreviation EBSK stands for, you gotta figure that one out yourself, because I have more important things to do. Like rummaging through piles of music and music related items that grow around my stereo and on my desk and figuring out what to do with them. Listening to music takes a lot of time. Looking at a painting takes about a millisecond, and with books you can always pretend that you have read it, but music you have to listen to. Some music demands to be listened to, even if it takes me quite some time to get around to it. Now don’t call the whistles on me by shouting out that a) this record is only 15 minutes and b) it has been released towards the end of 2003, because that has got nothing to do with what is going down. Jeez, some times time takes time and it always takes things time to take themselves to me. That is the truth, Bruce. So there.

Eric Bruns and John Rickman make up the improvisation duo EBSK, one of the more original and unique set offs to do so, by using bass and clarinet (Bruns) and drums and Casio SK1s, SK5s (Rickman). Apart from their own self-releases as SK Disque demonstrations and being part of the “begin live transmission” solidarity compilation on Dischord Records (well, they are from Washington DC, go figure) this is their latest release. The instrumentation would hint at a certain direction, but that is very misleading. Within these two tracks Bruns and Rickman take the long and winding road without losing sense of where they are headed – right through all kinds of styles and genres. Yes, it is jazz in a way, but it is also krautrock and noise and some kind of digital terrorism as well as a nice ambient soundscape thing, but let’s take it one by one.

Both tracks start off with some sort of rhythm figure. “Secret Highways” has distorted noise-bass-line doing an industrial backbeat, that gets more and more distorted and subdued with time, slowly adding bass and more industrial noises. I am waiting for the screaming vocals to kick in, but no such thing happens. Instead an Eighties-synthie layer emerges from nowhere. This goes on for a minute more or so, until suddenly and without warning the whole thing breaks into a breakbeat with multiple percussions and lots of echo, only mounted to the first part by the bassline and by the recurring synth-layers. And suddenly there is even a straight drum rhythm. Wonder what’s really going on here? Well, as soon as Bruns and Rickman have turned the whole thing into a thick layer of guitar- and synthsounds that will remind you of whalesong before kicking into a deadly groove for some time, you’ll wonder no more. The track ends in white noise, perfect. I’ll spare you the details of “Wobbly” because I guess you get the picture and I don’t want to spoil the fun for you.