By Stuart Broomer

This recording sat round for some time, gathering my growing curiosity, I
confess, with out me getting round to partaking with it to the extent it
required. I used to be initially drawn to it by a 50-year fondness for Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Opus ’70 (1969), a piece for an improvising quartet
utilizing supplies drawn from Beethoven. Enjoying with Beethoven is
the work of a well-travelled veteran, bassist, composer and bandleader
Carlos Bica, whose taking part in possesses an amazing magnificence, his

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taking part in usually sounding extra like a cello than a bass. He’s accompanied by a
assortment of effective musicians, although their devices hardly kind a typical
alignment: Daniel Erdmann, performs tenor and soprano saxophones,
João Barradas, accordion, and DJ Illvibe,
turntables. Whether or not it’s the musicians, the devices or the fabric,
composed over usually acquainted Beethoven themes, all the things is impressed
and labored with a type of transcendent lyricism. Particularly on tenor,
Erdmann possesses one of many nice lyric tones, as compelling in its personal
means as Getz or Coltrane. It’s instantly obvious on the opening “Leonore”,
composed by Carlos Bica “after” Beethoven’s “Leonore Overture No.3”.

A part of the recording’s genius is that, in a world of improvised music,
it’s nearly “overcomposed”, composed to the purpose the place methodologies
collide, fracture or, most fortunately, elide into new sonic worlds. Every of
the 11 tracks is each “after a Beethoven composition” and likewise credited to
a person—eight to Bica alone, one to Bica and João Paulo E. da Silva,
one to João Barradas (a luminous solo) and one to DJ Illvibe, nevertheless it hardly
stops there. Beethoven/Bica’s “Tiny Change” has Illvibe inserting and
altering a hefty pattern of Tom Wait’s “Small Change (Acquired Rained on with His
Personal .38)” then altering Erdmann’s tenor as nicely with bubbles of pitch-
shifting getting into the saxophonist’ strains. “Euch Werde Lohn In Bersern
Welten” has a recording of chanting and a terrific stereo duet by Erdmann and
Erdmann. Illvibe’s “Youngsters See Ghost Typically” is the turntablist’s solo
piece constructed on the ruins of “Moonlight Sonata” with an R&B vocal,
a distorted trumpet and a mangled horror film theme including to the
haunting.

Whether or not individually or collectively, the group creates its personal radical
house out of a sense of reverence and/or playfulness — other than Sick Vibe
everyone seems to be primarily a lyrical musician (perhaps him too), with Barradas a
type of nationwide treasure of accordion tunefulness, presumably sampled in
repeating chunks by Illvibe.

The particular pleasure of this music is you can put it on repeat and it’ll
at all times sound each the identical and completely different (“Leonore” actually is extra
lovely with each cross), nearly like a group of radios tuned to
random stations. Oddly, it intrudes not on the listener however on itself, the
simple listening music of chaos, one thing the world itself can’t cease making
and for which we have now a authentic want, as in this wondrous product that
makes classical magnificence without delay basic and exquisite in a contemporary means.