THE DUCKS AND DRAKES OF GUAPO AND CERBERUS SHOAL

This album is something of an oddity, one of a series of collaborative projects by The Cerebus Shoal, here working with Guapo. Each band contributes one long piece, and the final track is a mix of the two. As Diddy and Sean Trane have pointed out, this is very experimental stuff which doesn't resemble either band's mainstream output to any great extent - a good point of comparison could be King Crimson's ProjeKcts from a few years ago.

Guapo's track features the 5 Suns/Black Oni line up augmented by cellist Suvi Streatfield. There's a resemblance to Birth Of Liquid Pleiades from Tangerine Dream's Zeit here, a huge monlith of sound that hangs in space and gradually moves to reveal new facets of itself. It's dark and has some real atmosphere, but ultimately it doesn't really go anywhere.

Cerberus Shoal's piece was constructed from improvisations, which were broken down into one minute fragments by one member of the band and these were then reassembled by two others. A lot of voices can be heard, usually spouting pieces of random gibberish. Again, there's an interesting atmosphere but little else to be heard here.

The final remix of the two pieces works pretty well without springing any real surprises either.

It's in the nature of experiments to fail now and then, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing of value to be learned from them. This is definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of either band, or if you like Tangerine Dream's first four albums and minimalism in general. Newcomers would be better off going for 5 Suns or Black Oni.