GoGo Penguin: GGP/RMX

Rating: ★★★

Record and Artist Details

Musicians:

Chris Illingworth (p)

Label:

Blue Note

June/2021

Media Format:

LP, CD, DL

Catalogue Number:

3565291/3565289

RecordDate:

Rec. date not stated

Manchester's post-rave piano trio have seen their pioneering achievements somewhat bypassed by the wave of UK jazz which broke only a couple of years later, bringing with it a different idea of dance-floor rhythms hot-housed in sweaty South London clubs, and drawing on itchy grime, not electronica's minimalist loops or house's crashing crescendos.

Still, it was GoGo Penguin who found the bridge between Monk and Aphex Twin, and rave crowds and jazz improvisation, taking e.s.t.'s arena-rock dynamics into 21st century clubland. A Blue Note contract was their rare badge of honour. Quite where they now take their particular MO, built on increments and limitation, is a more fundamental question than external fashions.

Meanwhile, these remixes of their self-titled 2020 album emphasise how sui generis they've become in British jazz: of it but not quite in it (mainly to jazz's detriment), and reaching for a bigger world. Cornelius gives Chris Illingworth's faux-string piano notes on ‘Kora’ a metallic gleam, and fellow Japanese electronica artist Yosi Horikawa uses his found music techniques to add campfire crackle to ‘Embers’, which, as elsewhere here, is haunted by the original tune's flickering ghost. Sometimes GoGo Penguin simply vanish under the reupholstering. Often, buzzing, busier music results. Squarepusher fills the minimalist spaces of ‘Signal in the Noise, from a manic music-box opening to bejewelled neon flickers and psychedelic phasing, Blade Runner's claustrophobic soundscapes crawling over GoGo Penguin's clean lines. Squarepusher turns ‘F Maj Pixie’ into an ambient blues, and an abiding sense of melancholy is the main revelation teased out by these disparate second takes.

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