(2020) Pulled By Magnets - Rose Golden Doorways


Review:
Seb Rochford is best known as leader of the post-jazz outfit Polar Bear and co-founder of the punk-jazzers Acoustic Ladyland, as well as being a founder member of Sons of Kemet and a session drummer for everyone from Pete Doherty to Adele to Brian Eno. However, his latest project, , sounds nothing like any of the above. It is sludge rock disguised as ambient music; a grindcore album recorded in a cavernous church and overlaid with subtle spiritual tropes to the point that it sounds like a piece of holy minimalism. Putting an instrument through an effects unit can fundamentally change the nature of its sound. A guitar put through a distortion pedal can occupy the frequency range that we associate with a string section; a flute put through an echo chamber can sound like a choir of angels. Rose Golden Doorways is filled with such tricks of the ear – trompe l’oreille, if you will. It is a trio for sax, bass and drums but is nothing like, say, Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West. Rochford plays his drum kit like a classical percussionist, often buried deep in the mix; Neil Charles’s bass guitar sounds positively orchestral, Pete Wareham’s madly distorted saxophone can sound like Jimi Hendrix exploring the outer reaches of the solar system, or like someone operating a particularly temperamental analogue synth; or occasionally like the death cries of a buffalo. There are moments where they’re playing with the intensity of a thrash metal band, but sounding like Ligeti; there are noisy freakouts that create a diffuse, aural blizzard that resembles a peculiarly gothic variety of ambient music. It’s a collection of sounds quite unlike anything you’ve heard before, which is quite an achievement.





Tracklist:



Media Report:
Genre: jazz, post-rock
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits