ANTHROPODS

American turned Austrian Mark Holub is best known in the world of avant-jazz for his work with the critically acclaimed Led Bib which has been in existence since 2003 and has released seven albums. His newest project is cleverly called ANTHROPODS which continues his love of the world of avant-free jazz and mixes it with a little third stream, sonorism, spectralism and chamber music. All of this comes into play on the band's self-titled debut out in January 2022.

Holub handles drums and percussion and is joined by cellist Clemens Sainitzer who has worked with Artejui, e c h o boomer and Sain Mus, violinist Irene Kepl and bass clarinetist Susanna Gartmayer of Broken.Heart.Collecot and the band Dirac. Also on board is tenor saxist Jakob Gnigler and together this team of expert jazz players delivers a cool mix of chamber rock and avant-jazz with nice atonal passages and occasional outbursts of rock energy. Sometimes the violin and cello offer a bit of avant-gypsy swing to the mix.

The band is based in Vienna and this eponymous album offers nine tracks that add up to about an hour's playing time. This is completely instrumental and easily considered difficult music listening. Chock filled with crazy time signatures run amok and atonal skronkiness, the music is also pacifying and adopts many characteristics of modern classical music. The band plays together quite well offering bizarre contrapuntal variations around each other and at other moments create complete breakdowns of cooperative efforts resulting a very random free jazz style.

The lengthy "For Charles" takes a detour into a transcendental journey into sonorism and spectralism which evokes the stochastic music of Iannis Xenakis and pointillistic impressionism of Karlheinz Stockhausen. While there have been many styles of avant-jazz since the 1960s, i can't say i've heard a band that mixes these avant-garde forms of classical music with free jazz, chamber music and occasional motifs reminiscent of avant-prog. Although this band somehow gets lumped into the world of avant-prog there are really no rock aspects at all expect for some drumming patterns that could be considered as such.

While many avant-jazz releases can be too abstract for their own good, this one has a playfulness to it despite existing in that alternate universe where anti-melodies and improvisational craziness take precedence over constructed compositions. This is fairly complex music so no instant fuzzies with this one. It takes a few spins to wrap your head around it but once properly acclimated it's amazing how things fall into place. It's almost like an invented musical language is going on here. Initial exposure left me indifferent but i've grown to like this one a bit. Not even sure what to call this. Although it has aspects of classical, jazz, chamber rock and avant-garde, it's in a category all its own. Weird but satisfying.