Peter Brötzmann Octet
Machine Gun

THE REVIEW

It's easy to say extreme music, and more often it's used inappropriately than correctly.

This is extreme music. Forget Anal Cunt or the Pooh. Peter Brotzmann teams up with another 7 monstrous eccentrics birthed from the most hallucinatory avant-jazz environment and decides to create a monster. This is "Machine Gun", year 1968 ladies and gentlemen, fear and loathing and pain. It's pointless trying to understand what the hell the sonic disaster at the beginning of the two takes that give the album its name is; it’s quickly said, Mr. Brotzmann blows with terrifying force into his sax and is ready to obliterate all known sound systems. It’s the standard of avant-garde "punk-jazz" that has been truly ventured into by very few to this day, and if the first take is pure disaster always and forever, in the second there unfolds a slight dose of standard melodic "melody", ultrasonic saxophone phrases that pierce like nails into the nerve endings, objects mercilessly beaten, unclassifiable noises, two drums going wherever they please, and a piano appearing here and there to throw pins in the eyes.

"Representable" is introduced by an extremely nervous double bass that leads into drums racing at two hundred thousand per hour over the rusted notes of the two saxophones exploding in magnificence in the fury of Brotzmann and Parker, until they fade into futuristic decompositions, bursts of percussive delirium. And to conclude, check out the death march with the various "solos" of "Music For Hann Bennink" and the counterpoints on the accents as if they were playing alien-hallucinogenic thrash metal.

Go ahead and head to Sonisphere to soak up the brutal music of these guys. Then don't come crying to me if you missed out on this blast.