Red Edge

by Frode Gjerstad and Lasse Marhaug
Breathmint Records, Southampton, PA, n.d.
Audio CD, Catalog number: BM096, $5.00
Co-released by Carbon, Gameboy, Little Mafia and Sunship Records
Distributor Website: http://www.breathmint.net.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

The roots of this kind of saxophone blurt go way back. Poet/poemicist John Sinclair, inspired by post-Coltrane jazzmen like Albert Ayler, used to step onstage with the MC5 to blow. During their Fun House period, the Stooges lured Steve Mackay out of the carnal kitchen of his own band to provide improvisational notes in counterpoint to Iggy Pop's similarly animated vocal bursts. From Norway, these sessions by seasoned saxophonist Frode Gjerstad and younger electronicist Lasse Marhaug can be enjoyed in the same spirit, welcomed by those for whom noise is an edge of music fraught with potential, not (or not solely) an irritant.

The disc contains four cuts recorded on a single day, November 23, 2002. Yet they are four different negotiations or positions of the dialectical dance between a warm, breathy wind instrument and the inexorable machine. "A Dry Well" is immersive, an all-over painting of notes like a Jackson Pollack canvas. "The First Rule" is reminiscent of British musician Lol Coxhill, a tunefull riff with a free jazz layer superimposed, punctuated with a series of audio buzzes.

"Falling Down" suggests the bleating of a dying animal, followed by industrial noise like a whirring metal disk. It ends in toad-like low notes and electronic snuffling. The title cut, "Red Edge," begins with sounds evocative of sonar, then avian life. With chirps like crickets scuttling amongst its clarinet, it raises the troubling question if the omega point of electronic sound might not be to replicate or evoke the animal realm. Gjerstad and Marhaug convince us that perhaps the ‘red edge’ in question is the pulsing beat of blood, of life.