BRAINVILLE

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this iteration of Brainville edges closer to RIO/Avant territory, with more emphasis on improvisation than on jamming. The set list has mostly moved on from the Kramer collaborations as well. There are a couple of excursions to Planet Gong, including a spirited rendition of I Bin Stoned, and early Soft Machine is also revisited, including a rowdy Didditagain to end the proceedings. Betweentimes there are a couple of Cutler/Hopper improvisations and some of Allen's poetic solo offerings (although none of Allen's spoken word interludes). It captures this line up perfectly and shows that, despite their advancing years, the three musicians were still pushing boundaries and exploring possibilities.

This is my favourite of Brainville's live albums, but it's more of an acquired taste than the others. It's also the best sounding, although Hugh Hopper's bass is a bit subdued on the opening tracks. If you're open to hearing the Canterbury sound pushed into new shapes, or even turned inside out, listening to this album is an hour well spent.

A couple of months after their short trio tour of the UK, Brainville popped up in New York and hooked up with Kramer, another of Daevid Allen's regular collaborators. They played two sets at the Knitting Factory, highlights of which are captured on this 2008 release.

This time around there is nothing from the Gong songbook, and again the set list draws mainly on Allen/Kramer songs with a bit of early Soft Machine for good measure. For much of the time there are two basses, and it sounds like Kramer mostly holds the beat and allows Hugh Hopper's fuzz bass a more melodic role. For the most part the improvisations are longer and looser than on the Obscura release, so although some of the same songs are played, they sound substantially different to the trio recordings from a couple months before. After an hour of this Kramer sits at the piano and we get a pleasant version of the Hugh Hopper song Memories (previously sung by Robert Wyatt and Whitney Houston, among others).

A few days after this they went into the studio to record the slightly underwhelming Children's Crusade; this album comes much closer to realising the potential of this remarkable line up. It's distinctly non essential, but well worth investigating if you're a Canterbury pilgrim.

Appropriately enough we start on Planet Gong, with a version of Fohat Digs Holes in Space that takes a short while to find its groove, but quickly achieves escape velocity. From there onwards the set list leans heavily on Daevid Allen's collaborations with Kramer, especially 1992's Hitmen. There's a return to Gong for Flowers Gone and early Soft Machine for Hope for Happiness, but despite the songs dating from the 60s to the mid 90s it's a very coherent set. The songs are launch pads for spacy jams and improvisations, with Hugh Hopper's distinctive bass and Daevid Allen's gliss guitar floating over Pip Pyle's muscular but jazzy drumming. Daevid Allen is also in good voice, with regular interjections of scat singing and beat poetry.

This is the Brainville live album that I would be most inclined to recommend. The sound is a bit bass heavy, but overall it's an interesting offshoot of the Canterbury scene that is worthy of attention. 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4.

Sometimes it gets close to the classic Canterbury sound but in general it's the least similar to that sound; what we have here is more similar to some different kind of Prog bands like Bark Psychosis, Kayo Dot or even Maudlin of the Well. The music is very distorsioned, heavy but still with all of this I believe it is a very good album.

If you try to compare this album with some of the classics of Canterbury Scene you are going to be very disappointed but if you listen to it just like a random band and try to not think that Daevid Allen, Pip Pyle, Hugh Hopper and Mark Kramer are in fact the musicians behind it, you can actually get very satisfied with this album.

What I'm trying to say here is that this is actually a very good album if you are NOT expecting to hear the classic style of Canterbury Scene albums by the seventies.

Just three stars for this baby.

While the band officially existed from 1998-2006 they only managed to squeak out this sole studio recording in 1999 with a few live albums to follow under the moniker BRAINVILLE 3 which signified the new lineup of Allen, Hopper and Chris Cutler on drums. This band and album has been somewhat a blip in the canon of the prolific musicians involved and remains a rather unappreciated obscurity in the massive sprawling list of releases that these Canterbury stalwarts participated in during their decades long careers.

If one is to expect the usual Canterbury jazz-fusion technical workouts laced with lyrical whimsy and intricate instrumental workouts then i'm afraid you've come to the wrong project from any of these performers. THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE, while having clear references to Daevid Allen's stint in Gong as well as having jazzy periods of Canterbury recognition, is much more in the noise rock and avant-garde camp with a larger than life fuzz bass in modern times more associated with drone metal bands like Earth and Boris rather than anything that came from the most beloved subgenre of progressive rock.

With eleven tracks clocking in over 51 minutes, BRAINVILLE are just plain weird with angular janglly melodic meltdowns, completely freaked out glissando guitar psychedelia and lots, let me repeat, LOTS of distortion drenching the entirely album like a Sonic Youth festival at Guitar Center. The compositions are not laced with those quirky and charming pop hooks either but are rather nothing more than instrumental freeform jams with extended passages into a total breakdown of form although at least one of the instruments, usually the percussion remains somewhat rhythmic while the guitar and bass have a free for all in hyperactivity.

While mostly instrumental, vocals do occur from both Allen and Kramer but the majority of the album is a tribute to noisy fuzz- driven fantasies. When Allen's vocals are at the helm, the Radio Gnome Trilogy era does come to mind in the over-the-top trippiness of it all but the fuzzed out freakouts are more akin to his work with the Acid Mother's Temple on the 2004 Gong release "Acid Motherhood," which was a more structured and accessible style obviously derived from this completely unhinged improv session called BRAINVILLE.

I doubt many will appreciate this from the Canterbury crowd but for those who love chaotic noise with hints of melodies struggling to coalesce as if everyone involved is heavily sedated and struggling to find reality, then this will surely find a place in your thumb's up category since the drive is relentless and the muddled murkiness of it all points more to atonal masters such as Glenn Branca and no wave bands like DNA rather than the Canterbury resumes of the musicians involved. Very much for the open-minded and adventurous noise lovers but for traditional Canterbury-ists, you'd best give this one a miss.

Big names like Daevid Allen, Mark Kramer, Hugh Hopper and Pip Pyle should guarantee a good result. Well, the jury is still out on that one.

For those of you who regard GONG as not avant-garde enough, Brainville is the answer. This is GONG taken to the extreme and beyond. Just without the good ideas and melodies. Brainville's music is mostly atonal and based on some beastly torture of bass guitars, drums and guitars. Into the mix, they have added some sound effects. In one instance, a BEATLES song is being played in the background with some bass running over it. This album is avant-garde/RIO all over and very little Canterbury Scene like NATIONAL HEALTH and CARAVAN. Yes, it is a psyched out GONG album to a certain extent with some HENRY COW and PINK FLOYD thrown into this stew too.

The end result is not good. Well, it is not for me and I can only write a subjective review of this album. i do not like it. I think it is too atonal. I cannot excactly find the references to Jazz either. There are some good stuff here, but they are far between. This is not for me.

2 stars.