What, if anything, it has to do with the Bela Tarr cinematic masterpiece is anyone's guess, but what J.R. Robinson has done here is on a somewhat more mundane, though generally enjoyable level. Essentially, he's had a group of primo Chicago musicians play (improvise?) in the studio in various combinations, taken the results and overlaid them onto site recordings made in public locations in cities which serve as the titles of the three pieces: Pittsburgh, Paris and New York.
The musicians include members of Tortoise, US Maple and Jesus Lizard, abetted by Windy City avant jazzers like Ken Vandermark, Nate McBride and Fred Lonberg-Holm. On Pittsburgh, the music tends toward the darkly anthemic, heavy beats swimming in a murky field, made grainier by children's voices in a public pool. That ambient chatter certainly enhances the instrumental work on this piece, the latter being a bit routine in its glowering and groaning, the echoing voices bringing it a bit back to earth. "Paris" finds tenorist Keefe Jackson summoning up late 60s "spiritual" jazz of the kind found on Strata East records back in the day, brooding saxophone over roiling piano and wordless vocals, all of that atop the interior sounds of the Pompidou Centre. As with the first piece, no strong reason for conflating the two (or more than two? It often sounds as though there is more than one musical track in play) environments other than the initial notion of doing so. It's not the most novel idea in the world and one would have hoped for deeper connections between the two realms.
You get a glimmer of that in the final piece, "New York". The music, much more harshly drone-oriented, is far stronger for one thing. Lonberg-Holm, Tortoise's Jeff Parker and John Herndon and Mark Shippy from US Maple construct a fairly massive edifice of almost Niblockian quality that pretty much drowns out whatever noise was emanating out of the Guggenheim Museum on the day(s) Robinson did his site recording, though it still forms a nice, thin veneer that's always present if you listen closely. It's a wonderfully consistent, hyper-detailed wall of sound; you'd actually like to hear its echoing roar in a large architectural framework like the Guggenheim.
The release includes a brief DVD containing two pieces, "East" and "West", each comprised of stationary shots, the former taken on Manhattan rooftops, the latter in what appears to be a Southwestern desert, held for a few minutes, accompanied by site-specific sounds similar to those used on the CD, large-seeming, occupied interior spaces. The contrast is interesting, the pieces just long enough, 10-12 minutes each, not to overstay their welcome.
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