Eyebrow: Strata

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Pete Judge (t)
Chris Vine (g, one track)
Paul Wigens (d, perc, vn, bowed g)

Label:

Eyebrow Music

February/2018

Catalogue Number:

Ebm005

RecordDate:

April 2017

Get the Blessing trumpeter Pete Judge is doing similarly interesting, approachable work with fellow Bristolian Paul Wigens. Their fifth Eyebrow album continues to build cinematic atmospheres from improvised passages, with a conventionally melodic core. Judge’s stately solo on ‘Overpass’ would grace any hard-bop ballad, even as its spectral aura suggests electric Miles, or Nils Petter Molvær. His lead trumpet – often layered over his own murkier, more fractured playing – is a fixed point of piercing clarity, jumping into sharp foreground focus in ‘Tormentil’ amid ambient swirls. The woody skip and trip of Wigens’ drums meanwhile speed up on ‘Soapstone’ as if being hustled and hunted by a manic metronome, as Judge stands his ground with notes which expand in slow-motion splashes. Almost inevitably for Bristol (where Blessing drummer Clive Deamer stumbled on drum’n’bass’s similarity to bebop), Wigens slips in drum’n’bass breakbeats, also contributing bee-buzz violin, and Indian-style percussion on the haunted shivers of ‘Sediment’. A bold sense of dynamics adds further definition to this organic dabble in electronic possibilities.

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