Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid
NYC

Mò so cazzi supersoul, the bottle of mirto is almost empty and the cool wind comes from the black sea at night, turn off the lights and "Arrival" gets inside you... That old chap Steve Reid (Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra) makes that drum roll like a metronome and this young crossbreed Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) shoots you with nine minutes of electronic psychedelia... if I were Roy Batty I would never have felt so good, I’d be in the dreamlike dimension of a robot with circuits shorting out, just like a human drenched in LSD to the limit... but spare me this tension that "25th Street" puts on me, it feels like something is about to happen at any moment and instead, it's just a splendor of cymbals and drums hit by electric currents searching for tungsten filaments to illuminate. And I don't want that.

I don't want to live with the light, I prefer to rest as a sleepwalker with closed eyes on a green meadow just like the virgin on the cover of the latest Filmworks by John Zorn and let myself be crossed by these inconclusive arpeggios of "Between B & C" that seem to rhythm the march of a thousand fireflies in a moonless night. How I wish this splendid darkness would never end!... and "1St & 1St" is the solution: bass cranked up and drums in an upbeat until the break of dawn. In the end, it will be the (re)start of a new day; the bamboo music that envelops "Departure" seems to want to recreate the rhythm of the diligent human ants upon waking up who will never have a clue how jazz and electronics can keep you with your eyes open for an entire night watching a movie that exists only in your head.

Kieran and Steve have conceived this work as if immersed in the six locations of the Big Apple that give the titles to the six tracks of the album. But even here, in the darkness of a simple Mediterranean terrace, crowded venues, quiet parks, winter evenings in the middle of August flow through the mind. These two bastards demonstrate how anticipation is more important than the final moment: when the shit hits the fan....