SINISTRI

Free pulse

CD, Häpna

The music on this record is full of holes. Like walking a path of broken tiles without stepping on the breaks is an exhausting and ennerving occupation, but it still seems satisfying enough to do so for a lot of people. And you can still hold a straight line between point A and point B, if you wish to do so. If you are walking a path of perfectly fine tiles trying to avoid imaginary breaks in the tiles, you are either producing art or living out a strange psychosis. Some people won’t be able to see the difference anyway. Because it takes a lot of effort and concentration to be able to walk aside the beaten path on a way you only imagine yourself, always ignoring the fact, that there might not be a proper foundation for a path at all, that you might drop down into a jettison or an abyss of unmeasured depth at any time.

If “free pulse” does one thing, then it is to radiate the feeling of deep concentration. Of dense and tight thinking into the music. Every sound seems to be set for a purpose. Of course, playing nonmetrical rhythms on a traditional drumset takes a lot of concentration and effort. But also the guitar-sounds consist mostly of half-played chords; you only get either the punch or the release of single chords, you get scraping chords in weird rhythms Here and there, almost as if forlorn in their natural environment, you’ll get a few notes of “solo” or a chord-progression worthy of its name. There is a little guitar shredding in “NY vamp (second set)” that reminds me a lot of Steve Albini’s live-frenzies when still playing with Big Black. But being able to play a straight line of chords is no matter for honour anyway, actually. Maybe the guitar is trying to hang on to the drums, thereby giving the strings a self-multiplying rhythmic element. All in all it is definitely the drums that build the spine to all of the music played hereon. Check out the drumsolo during “Ampstone”. Drum solo here meaning a drumset being played alone while all other instruments are resting. But let’s not forget the electronics around here and there, whose tiny interpolations or small licks of noisy sounds, thrown with a casual gesture but still heavily condensed and in sync (or would that be parallel out of sync in this case) into the holes left by the drums and the guitar. At other times a hi screeching frequency will prevail for a couple of minutes (e.g. “cold fried tk4”), or some subtle bass-sounds and so on. This record would work well with just drums and guitar, maybe evoking memories of The Ruins bass and drums thick layer of sounds simmered down to a microscopic foil of sound particles. But it is the electronics that really take “free pulse” over the top, by adding another layer of sounds to the structure. And structure, finally, is what “free pulse” is all about. Or to be exact: trying to find a new kind of structure. Which makes all of the tracks very similar indeed, but differing greatly in detail nevertheless.

Calling non-metrical weird is okay, I guess, because it is a super-natural thing to do. People are built easy. Whatever rhymes goes along fine with them. If it has a strong, simple beat, then it will be successful and distributed widely. Check out Scooter playing full stadiums in Israel and Japan, if you don’t believe me. But mass has never been a valid argument for quality. Even broken down to the avant-garde / electronic / fringe music scene and its quite astonishing production of music, Sinistri stand out within a world filled with glitch-compilations, clicks’n’cuts-tracks and free improve jazz records, as unique due to their approach and the heavy dose of intentionality. Roots and influences might be found in all kinds of directions, and maybe Sinistri are not technically or music historiologically masters of their profession, but definitely in finding their own way of dealing with music. I can see them relaxing to a heavy dose of psychedelic rock or fusion jazz just as easy as to fringe electronic music from the Seventies up to last week. But all of that is rendered regardless when they grab their instruments and are able to invent something new from these broken puzzle pieces.