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BORBETOMAGUS  Zurich  CD   (Agaric)   13.98


2013 is starting to turn into a banner year for Borbeto fans. First we got that killer live album Trente Belles Ann�es earlier this year, a bulldozing recording of the legendary American "snuff-jazz"/extreme improv trio in action over in Europe from 2009, and now they've followed that right up with another new disc on Agaric, this one a reissue of the 1985 double Lp Zurich. Long out of print, this live album captures Borbetomagus performing at Rote Fabrik in Zurich, Switzerland sometime in late 1984, blasting their ferocious improvised sound directly into the skulls of a small but appreciative and receptive audience that seems to be lapping up each new blast-wave of nuclear-strength skronk that the band unleashes on 'em. Opening with the colossal "Fleetwood DeKooning", the trio of Donald Miller (Guitar, Alto Saxophone), Jim Sauter (Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone) and Don Dietrich (Tenor Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Guitar) launch into an epic length battle as the horn players jab and squeal breathlessly over Miller's corrosive guitar-scrape and layers of smeared feedback, a squirming mass of skronk that sounds like some hellish Sonny Sharrock jam being run backwards and in slow-motion through a broken down tape machine. Their playing shifts from forceful, full-on blasting with screaming high-register trills slicing thorough the air, to more subdued playing where their deep circular breathing techniques and waves of crackling drone take over, allowing for tiny fragments of melodious sound to creep through the violent blurt; though even at it's calmest, this track often ventures into agonizing frequencies that are as brutal as anything to have ever come out of the harsh noise underground.

The following five tracks are shorter pieces that also range from violent bouts of high end skree and locking bells, scraped guitar slime and wailing discordant chords, animalistic howls and shrill piercing tones, swarms of flesh-rending insectile buzz. Some of the tracks that left some particularly large bruises on my frontal lobe are "Fried Tampons", which begins with a buzzing swarm of charred guitar noise that could pass for something off of an early Earth record for a second, before the rest of the band rushes in with another vicious bleat-beating; and the two long pieces that close the album, "Nein Is The Loneliest Number" and the twenty minute quasi-reprise "Elaine DeFleetwood". The former sees the group unleashing massive waves of harmonic-drenched drone from their instruments, the sheets of howling discordance creating a strange seasick sound as the sound builds and billows outwards, transforming into burbling alien soundworld. The closer is a real show of brute force, a ceaseless blast of hardcore skronk and some seriously heavy, mangled guitar noise that pours out in a torrent of sludgy low-end axe-scrape and slippery, nauseating fret-board abuse oozing out of Miller's smoking amplifier, the horns interlocking into violent frantic screaming runs, ascending into a cacophony of violent noise that completely fills the room over the last half of the piece. As brutal as anything else in the band's catalog, Zurich still sounds as incendiary and extreme now as it did back in '85, and is available here for the first time ever on Cd, reissued with the original liner notes from Rev. Dr. Paul Laliberte along with photos from the performance.


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