SONAR & DAVID TORN: VORTEX

Sonar is a pioneering band from Switzerland, founded in 2012. Their name represents a certain architectural genre that solidifies the music, which means that they intend to create diversified and highly structured avant-garde rock. In terms of style, they are minimalist. They have two three-stringed guitars to do this. It is similar to KC, and often plays highly repeated multi-level music, reminiscent of a tape delay recording system like Robert Fripp. This year's Vortex (with David Torn) is their fourth album. Please come to a jazz expert David Torn to help them. David Torn was selected as the best experimental guitarist, but he is good at electronic music and similar. The electronic programming of the device, which helped the band achieve many sound effects and level changes. In terms of new specialization, this kind of minimalism similar to the late KC brought an embarrassing psychedelic state, but because it is not too heavy, I think it can be called a psychedelic and jazz KC, full of mysteries and Hypnosis. It's like a musical sculpture, full of compact composition and addictive. Of course this can also be called Math Rock. All songs are full of rhythm, but using wacky rhythms, based on repetition and dynamic variables, the time accuracy is accurate, so it can be called mathematical rock as if it were constructed. A seemingly irregular but full of regular blockhouses, a seemingly asymmetrical and actually exact copy of the piece, a visual aesthetic works with a simple but deep complex and complex structure, 3/4, 4/4, and 5/4 shots Build and parallel in turn. In order to create such an ultra-rational effect, David Torn's assistance is crucial. An electronic crimson king hides madness and irrationality in strict discipline. The first half of the album still maintains a brighter hue. It is not enough to get dark and mad at the back. The bass rhythm in the tail song Lookface! is crazy, but it has to be admired. A surprising rock math masterpiece , a model of music architecture. Conservative to a four-star, but may be able to reach four and a half stars! Strongly recommended.

Now here is something truly interesting: Swiss instrumental Math Rock band, master of heady polyrhythmic constructs, has guitarist extraordinaire David Torn sitting in and lifting their songs geometrically with his sonic magic.

1. "Part 44" (9:56) bass, drums and two guitars establish a fabric over which David Torn adds his guitar meanderings. The frequent shifting of chords between the two arpeggiating guitars makes this quite interesting and engaging. At 2:40 there is a shift into lower octaves that gives Torn's guitar more prominence (which he could take more advantage of). By the end of the fourth minute the baseline weave thins for a while as Torn disappears. The bass gets prominence here until a sudden thunder bolt of static bursts in at 4:55: Torn is ready to tear it up. After a minute of more static, David finally does just that--piercing the treble lines with some shrill notes. Towards the end of the seventh minute, his solo becomes more active--and continues to do so for the next glorious ninety seconds. After that the drums and bass are left to "clean up" beneath Torn's sustained scream. Nice job--as a band! (9/10)

2. "Red Shift" (10:31) opens with strumming guitars and jazzy cymbal play with simple bass. At 0:55 there is a key shift but the fabric remains essentially the same. At 1:36 there is a shift into more oppositional polyrhythmic strumming and then picking from the two guitars. (Still no Torn.) A quiet passage at the end of the third minute hails the arrival of Mr. Torn. An extended solo passage of David Torn's most unbridled soloing starts around 3:10, escalates, and lasts into the second half of the sixth minute. The song then plays out in a quieter, less dynamic version of the first two minutes.(9/10)

3. "Waves And Particles" (7:49) a slow, subtly developing whole-band weave of the KING CRIMSON "Discipline" style- -until David lets loose in the second half. Man, this guy can make a guitar sing and scream and wail like NOBODY else! (9.5/10)

4. "Monolith" (10:47) radio-like sound frequencies are interspersed with two (and later three--Torn's) guitars each doing their own thing in contribution to the polyphonic weave. Again, the most interesting part of this otherwise- dull song is Torn's soloing in the middle (sixth through eighth minutes). (8/10)

5. "Vortex" (9:37) drums and deep bass notes play a little more prominently into the polyrhythmic weave from the start of this one. In the second minute one of the guitars (R) tries to spice it up a bit with a faster arpeggio and then some heavy reverb and long sustain. At 2:35 the left guitar takes a turn in the lead with some strumming. Then ride cymbal is played while David Torn's single sustained note enters and takes the fore. The ensuing solo, over the band's excellent low-based weave, is awesome. Then, just as suddenly, at 3:50, Torn crescendoes and fades while everyone else quiets down. Halfway through the fifth minute, David makes a return appearance before the drums and right guitar resume their place in the most interesting spots in the soundscape. Odd guitar sounds (except to those fans of Adrian Belew) sneak in from time to time as the band fades down and out of the mix, only to return in a cool way at 7:20. Torn begins to shred and tear at the skies again soon after. Guitars return in support in the final minute as band mounts a final cresendo beneath Torn's rents. Second best song on the album. (9.5/10)

6. "Lookface!" (7:13) what causes this song to stand out is its full-out start: everybody bursting into their power moves, all at the same time, from the song's opening note. Then, in a reversal of expected patterns, the song becomes quiet and delicate in the second half. Brilliant and very engaging! The best song on the album! (9.5/10)

Five stars; a masterpiece of King Crimson Discipline-inspired instrumental progressive rock music.

To the Swiss band SONAR's music is attributed the notion of "mathematical music". To be even more precise, I would rather say that this is a geometrical music, sometimes asymmetrical, that it seems like reconstructing Euclidean theorems in a multidimensional spaces. Their last album, "Vortex", is benefiting from the collaboration of the futuristic guitar hero David Torn. His contribution brings up a colorful pitch drop of rockish flavor upon the Sonars sound of polyrhythm landscapes. The relationship between these guitar triangle (Stephan Thelen, Bernhard Wagner and David Torn) embroider a fluid dialogue of a melodic trigonometry which merge into hypnotic and magic dough sound. This sheaf of guitars is sustained by the rhythmic section (Christian Kuntner ? bass and Manuel Pasquinelli ? drums) in a Crimsonian discipline of controlled chaos. The aesthetic vision is very much alike the "dark" genre, but it just constitutes itself in the elements which the death-metal rock bands are missing: finesse, elegance and coherence.

The sonar geometry of the tunes on the "Vortex"album is alluring you like a swirl with complex rhythms in a minimalist format, with overlay levels of bunks of melodic constructions. David Torn's solo guitar parts vibrates and screams with a sensuality, dissonant at some points, congruently merging into the isometric passages of Stephan and Bernhard guitars. The guitar dialogues of these last two are like parallel mirrors, sometimes deformed, other times integrated in this mathematics of sound. Regarded in a whole, "Vortex" is a journey into unwonted sound spaces, ingenuously and mathematical rigorously built in an unitary form. A vortex like an ecstatic trance produced by a Dervish dance.

I believe that "Vortex" is an album Pythagoras would have liked it too.

4 stars all the way!

Right now I consider this my third favourite record from 2018 after the works of Dewa Budjana and ALL TRAPS ON EARTH. And I have to mention another trio of albums starting with "Vortex" which is the first five star SONAR album for me and no it's not a coincidence that this is where David Torn gets on the bus. And the appeal of this one is his upfront presence. It's like he let his hair down(and he has a lot of it) impressing to no end the other four musicians involved.

2019's "Fractal Guitar" by SONAR's leader Stephan Thelen is a five star affair where Torn and many other guitarists show their unique skills. Love that record and my favourite from that year. Finally "Tranceportaion II" from SONAR released in 2020 makes such a great trio of like-minded albums but with each having it's own flavour and this third record I'm mentioning again has Torn on it but it's the other two guitarists and the bass player using tritone instruments that sounds so incredible.

The music here was recorded live in studio over three days in Switzerland and I'm so glad Torn was there and not just mailing in his parts. In fact Torn produced and mixed this recording. Again Thelen is the main composer here but everyone chips in when it comes to that. So we get three guitarists, a bass player and a drummer. The liner notes are nothing but pictures of the band at the studio and they are meaningful and show a real bond already between Torn and the rest of the guys. This is such a consistent record which I like, in fact five of the six tracks I'd rate at 5 stars leaving "Monolith" as the one lone non-killer track. Still really good and the longest at almost 11 minutes but man those other five have me scratching my head as to which one is the best, or even a top three.

I was always drawn to the closer "Lookface!" as it hits the ground running while the others usually build. A heavy rhythm section on this one with Torn soloing over top. "Red Shift" has to be a tip of the hat to that Space Rock band from the UK. Strummed guitar is different to open but it works as drums and bass kick in. This trips along mid-paced and it sounds amazing. Love when the guitar rises out of that calm around 4 1/2 minutes. Torn is back soloing late. "Waves And Particles" is a drifting track as Torn comes and goes. This just sounds so good.

The title track like others opens with the band tripping along until around 3 1/2 minutes when everything is amped up. So good! We get a calm then it builds and this sounds incredible ending with Torn and some really good drum work just before 8 minutes. And yet the opener "Part 44" might be the best of the bunch. Torn puts on a show and this just "sounds" so good and at 10 minutes it's a ride but Torn kills on the second half of this one.

This one for me is mostly about the David Torn influence, it's very strong and less so moving forward.