The Heliocentrics
13 Degrees of Reality

This Anglo-Saxon ensemble has already been discussed, and with this album, they only reiterate what they offered in 2007 with their debut. The Heliocentrics: musicians who embrace the formalities of past music to extend them into the future with a highly experimental style, primarily anchored in jazz, funk, psychedelia, ethnic music (African and Middle Eastern), instrumental hip-hop, and kraut-rock. I note that the order of the mentioned genres is not accidental, and I conclude their brief introduction by describing them as what I hope jazz will evolve into.

2013: six years from the debut, translatable as six years of musical maturation, six years of collaborations, six years of live jams. What emerges is something absolutely consistent with their first utterance, both in style and structure, but in many aspects significantly better. The overture immediately places the album at the forefront of the year's musical anomalies: a propagandistic sampling followed by noises that seem to violently rip hard bop from the '50s to transfigure it (or disfigure it, if you will) into a chaos of electronic distortions. The album continues: an inexplicable music advances, played with seemingly inexplicable instruments, thus feeding the indecipherable, almost inexplicable character of the work. Personally, I conceive the beginning of the album as a conceptual and relatively rapid intro of six tracks, then revealing its substance.
After surpassing this conceptual intro, an inevitable addiction makes the music suddenly seem to evaporate, showing what the Heliocentrics truly represent: a vortex of floating rhythms, so exaggerated as to obscure every melody, thus leaving one at the mercy of an exponentially moving groove, incessant, persevering.

I find the cover, just like for the debut, particularly fitting: an optical illusion aimed at expressing the cognitive inconsistency expertly transferred into music. Also contributing to what has just been said is the structure of the album: 21 tracks, ranging from the extremely brief duration of exemplary sketches (and not drafts) of a few seconds to full-fledged jams of several minutes, well reflecting the concept of continual defragmentation and sudden assembly. The constant change, the lack of replication of the scores, creates an amorphous mass in constant transformation.
Music that stands in a limbo between what is concrete and what is dreamlike. If it were a painting, I would undoubtedly classify it as avant-garde, but I would struggle to be more specific about the style: there's the multifaceted representation of cubism, the dynamism of futurism, but also (and above all) the intangibility of abstractionism and surrealism. In any case, I confirm a phrase already expressed in the past: an àpeiron made into music.

The compositions represent real stylistic puzzles, and in the heart of the jungle that is the album, they reach an almost arcane essence. The professionals involved are undoubtedly excellent in restoring what jazz, funk, psychedelia, and more have already shown in the past, but the added value lies in the highly original experimentation in which they operate. The result is a sophisticated collage of elements, even diametrically opposed in conception: now silence, now noise; now comfort, now unease; now orderly, now chaotic. All always in the name of unpredictability. In achieving such a result, one can only think of an extensive ensemble, not so much for the conception of the work as for its execution: they are indeed many (nine) and with many instruments (bass clarinet, cello, lyre, electric bass, double bass, kalimba, percussion, Thai guitar, flute, synthesizer, violin, drums, keyboards, piano, and even handmade instruments). The proposal is of high complexity, to the point that the compositions may seem apparently illogical and chaotic, but it's not really so.

Avoiding various clarifications, imagine a compound with Bitches Brew, Endtroducing..... and Freak Out! among its constituents left to ferment for hundreds of years. Good, now you should at least have a vague idea of the album. It would be even better to listen to it, aware of the risk that it might bounce off you leaving you absolutely unscathed, just as it might become a maniacal obsession. Personally, I would be thrilled if the future frontiers of jazz pointed much in this direction, and I think the Heliocentrics have already composed something that in a few years will have the label of a masterpiece.

Miles would be proud.