Mats Gustafson and Yoshimi - Words on the Floor (Smalltown Superjazz)
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
This isn't your average pop record, so to judge it using the same criteria you would apply for a critique of an average pop record would be silly. The fact that this is split in to only two (sonically really rather similar) tracks, the first, 'Soundless Cries With Their Arms In The Air' lasting only three minutes and the second, 'And The Children Play Quietly With Words On The Floor', going on for forty two minutes, might infuriate you, but if that's the kind of thing that does get your goat, then prepare for your goat to be got by a lot more to do with this record before its time is out.
A collaboration between Yoshimi of the Boredoms (she who battled against the Pink Robots for The Flaming Lips, you'll remember) and improvisational jazz legend Mats Gustafson, also seen collaborating recently with The Thing and Sonic Youth, 'Words on the Floor' sees the two incredibly talented underground legends really having fun with the tools at their disposal. Primarily this means that Yoshimi wails like a banshee with her incredible voice, whist Mats parps on his Saxophone like he's trying to hail some particularly jazzy demon from another world. Occasionally, they do it together. Sometimes, one of them goes off on one, whilst the other was presumably in the studio just marvelling at how really in to it the other one was getting, sat there, in silence. Sometimes, they pick things up and bang them, or drop them, or throw them at each other (maybe). It goes on like that the whole time. And I've just made it sound like the most difficult, nay awful, record ever made.
But it's not. Yes, it's two people messing about (OK, 'improvising', whatever...), but you have to understand that these two people really are particularly good at messing about. Perhaps they're the best messers-abouters currently messing about in the world. They feed off each other brilliantly, and they aren't completely taken up with the idea of making music that only they will like - they allow the listener time to get themselves together by creating long atmospheric stretches, and also really f**k with the heads of their audience by providing passages of sound that one would be hard pressed to call music whatsoever. But if we didn't have people like this to question the boundaries of what is and what isn't music for us, we'd all be listening to the Pigeon Detectives. What we have to be grateful for is the fact that the people who are asking these questions are asking them quite so persistently, and quite so well as this pair.
Stream tracks from 'Words on the Floor' HERE.
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