Borbetomagus
Barbed Wire Maggots

THE REVIEW

Despite the clear physical impression of being literally overwhelmed (and traumatized) by a stubbornly uncompromising, cranky vast sonic layer, the reckless jazz entity from New York, Borbetomagus, is in this context composed exclusively of just three, at least musically, insane elements.

Harbingers of one of the most insane free jazz possible and humanly un(i)maginable, Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich (saxophones) & Donald Miller (guitar) realized, about twenty-five years ago (recorded in 1982 and published the following year), one of the most manically iconoclastic, challenging, unreasonable works that musical memory can effectively recall.

"Barbed Wire Maggots" is none other than an authentic, crystalline, ecstatic avant-garde delirium/martyrdom in its pure state: an immense and completely mad, seemingly aphasic hurricane essentially composed of the twisted intertwining of the piercing, scathing, abrasive, daring, and bacchanalian ups and downs resulting from the exhausting work of the two saxophones (practically lacerating-blunt weapons) crumpled onto the grotesquely and indistinctly cacophonous guitar work in the background.

Each of the two vinyl "sides," for a total count of a concrete forty minutes, is occupied (better: clogged) by a single suite that respectively takes the title of the very side on which it unfolds; furthermore, the beginning of the scathing "Side A" generously gives a way to reconsider: in the first two turns of the long clock hand, almost nothing incontrovertible happens; only a few entrenched and increasingly sharpening menacing flourishes (as if to say: leave this inhospitable valley of tears while you still can) climbs from the musical-abyss about to definitively swallow us: from that very moment onward, it will be exclusively vivid, reverberating, blinding, damnably steep, sonic raving.

Dangerous.