Spring Heel Jack
AMaSSED

Epoch-making album, of an abyssal greatness that projects jazz into the new millennium. It is the Spiderland of a style that had remained stuck on itself, entrusted as it was to people of questionable value for whom a concert at the Blue Note represents the conquest of a musically ideologically conservative empyrean.

Spring Heel Jack reformulates jazz by coining it within industrial spaces, an industrial jazz that is already post with the impact of an explosion, like stuffing Ayers Rock with dynamite, they shatter the conventions of the genre. That it arrives 10 years after the immortal masterpiece by Slint only confirms the retro tendencies of the jazz world. Every harmonic discourse disappeared, only timbres and sounds remain, in a sense even the performer disappears, instruments are automatic mechanics, no emotion, industrial machines tear the sound context, the sounds themselves are noises because they are deprived of any sense, losing the meaning also violates the signifier, it is pure chance that they fall into the sphere of the audible, they could also be planets in orbit or flies. It is a step forward even compared to Spiderland, the referent is obliterated, it is a self-denying work, apophatic, unrelated. No ignition, the dynamic (forte-piano) is destructured by the lack of narrativity (not played loudly compared to a prior for instance) and even the depth among the parts is pure opinion in a world which has technique as its teleology. The virtuosities are only apparent, the slides of the trumpet for example do not seek the highest note, they are the scanning of a spectrum of perception on which to find a foothold, the fate of all this is aphasia, silence, as lapidary as that which closes Wittgenstein's Tractatus «Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.».

The aesthetics of automation rule, take the lull of track 4: as if a mechanical arm put a Miles Davis record on a gramophone to make its iron offspring sleep; it is not music from an urban milieu, the only option is to imagine a scenario like those drawn by Moebius in Arzach, huge spaces and relics of industrial civilizations, still in track 4 it could be a farewell song (it closes with a sort of roar): a kilometer-long construction in the middle of nowhere discovered to be the smokestack of a blast furnace and the trumpet that greets the woman up there, or it is a farewell to the smokestack or vice versa perhaps. This album is for people 10,000 years later, it is the praise of autism, of emotional dullness, for all those who are not disturbed by the 100 deaths a day in Baghdad because if we still bleed it is only a matter of time. Moroc is not desert music but rather of Atlas with mountains shimmering like steel flows. Obscured is punctuated by a hand clap, beings depleted of themselves, chemically lobotomized, intone a last desperate effort of humanity, among the cries of Achtung of a guitar, the percussion is sirens in a penitentiary where an escape has taken place, all instruments are robot sentinels on alert, however conditioned, their gestures are the only sign of redemption in a panorama of reification of technological concretion, as if a new man were yet to be built.