ACTUAL
MUSIC QUARTET RSM – s/t
(CD,
R.A.I.G.)
While on the one side the label freely names the music
as “post-rock” without missing to point out the pointlessness of this
label, the name of the band sounds academic and classically trained, and
they are. Summing up, one could say that the debut CD of the “actual music
quartet RSM” from Smolensk in Russia sounds just the way that ECM would
sound today if it were a rock-music-label and not a jazz label. Clean,
technically perfect virtuosity and still with a lot of feeling and
asethetics inside. The actual music quartet RSM would be like the Gary
Burton Quintet on ECM, probably, but what kind of comparison is that? Just
because I have developed a faible for the mid-seventies to mid-eighties mix
of fusion-jazz and standard ease of the artists on ECM does not mean I have
to compare them to current music at all, or does it? Well, just listen to
the perfect clarity of the sound and dynamics of the beginning of “in one
point” and then try to stand up against my impression.
What these four musicians are able to do is best shown
on “grooba”, a superfast race through a variety of styles, with notes a
million per minute and perfect timing. But it is also more than just a show
off for ability (a true deadstop for a lot of music), because it retains
meaning, sliding along like a giant, fast worm, wiggling and whirring by.
The following “clock 77:77” is then a dark and slow track with an
intriguing guitar line that slowly grows into a gigantic wave of music,
threatening to overpower everything in its wake. These two tracks are deftly
set in the middle of the record, and all the other tracks, eight in all
together, sort of circulate around them both in style and arrangements.
From current bands I would most likely compare the
Actual Music Quartet RSM to the other instrumental band that has left the
realms of rock behind themselves and started to dive into dynamics and sound
more than the riff and the verse / chorus / verse structure still around in
instrumental bands nowadays, and that is Don’t mess with Texas. Interestingly, though,
while the musicians from DMWT come from a rock- or even punk-background, the
members of the AMQ-RSM are all classically trained musicians with all kinds
of experience in jazz and classical projects. As such you wouldn’t hear
that there are only four people at play, all of them multi-instrumentalists,
that is why. The main basis is the classic rock band outfit, though, with
drums, bass guitars and some keyboards.
