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BORBETOMAGUS  A Go Go  CD   (Agaric)   13.98


As if it wasn't cool enough that the classic 1990 Borbetomagus album Snuff Jazz has just been reissued, we've also have a BRAND NEW Borbetomagus album called Borbetomagus: a Go Go, which features a complete live set from the legendary free-jazz trio of Jim Sauter, Don Dietrich, and Donald Miller performing at the Club Pezner in Villeurbanne, France in December 1998. Normally, I wouldn't get all excited over a new live album, but Borbetomagus have proven that they are one of the few bands out there that actually sound WAY heavier on their live recordings than they do in the studio. Live, the horns and guitar all melt together into one massive sonic stew instead of being seperated in the studio, creating a monstrous murky din like on their flesh-rending live album Live In Allentown. The 1998 performance captured on this disc is even more dense and brutal than that, and one of the main reasons is that guitarist Donald Miller is incredibly loud in the mix, his axe cranked way up and almost dominating the room. On past Borbeto albums, both live and studio, Donald's guitar tends to exist more in the background, creating a mangled surface of damaged amp noise and choked guitar skronk that the screeching saxophones of Don Dietrich and Jim Sauter surf across. Here, though, it sounds like there are dozens of guitars, every one of them cranked to maximum volume, vomiting vast torrents of grinding industrial noise and crushing distorted crunch, forming a brutal wall of symphonic feedback and amplifier roar that is simply skull-crushing when you crank this album up to the max. The first track "Chiote a l'espirt" is a 33 minute behemoth with searing sax chaos and awesome cetacean moans scrambling for purchase over a massive wall of low-end drone, and when the band really gets moving, they summon up a crushing, grating cacophony that sounds like gates of Hell being slowly pulled back as an army of howling Candarian demons rushes forth. That's followed by "Gestapo She Wolf Barbie", a shorter (at 14 minutes) but even heavier blastscape that sounds like a regular Borbeto jam being sloooooowed waaaay dooown into a syrupy miasma of hellish black machine clank and infinite brass screams. The final jam is called "We Were Done With The Judgement Of God Last Week" and crashes into a sickening freakout of scraped metal, weird processed horn sounds, and super-heavy guitar grind seperated into blocks of sound, tied together by fragments of surprisingly lyrical melody.

The prominent guitar noise on this live album sets it apart from most of Borbetomagus's catalog, and while this is most definitely the band in their full-on, bonecrushing "snuff jazz" mode with all dials set to eleven, the ultra-heavy guitar destruction on Borbetomagus A Go Go would probably appeal to fans of extreme guitar-based improv/noise too, even if they might have been turned off by the more high-end skree assaults of older Borbetomagus. While listening to this album I was reminded more than once of the heavy amp-blasting drone jams of bands like Skullflower, Total, Double Leopards, and Jazzfinger, and this Borbeto set definitely moves through some similiar territory of viscous, industrial-strength murk, caustic grind, and crushing sax-splattered drone. Might just be my new favorite Borbetomagus album, and for any of you Borbeto fans, this is obviously essential!


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