Five Albums You Need To Hear

Electronic music by a jazz drummer, one-man death metal, and more

Lesley Mok

It feels like forever since I’ve done one of these posts, but it’s only been a month. This time, we’ve got some crunchy technical death metal; a veteran organ trio; a collection of saxophone quartets; an electronic album from a jazz drummer; and an exciting out-jazz collaboration. Let’s dive in!

Assimilated Transdimensionalization is a solo project of Jøzsef Tøth, aka Tisza Kara, of Budapest, Hungary. To date, he’s released four EPs — Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine, Neuroflesh Incubation Through Cosmic Machinery, and Cosmic Erasure Of Biogenesis — and one full-length album, Neuroforged In The Womb Of Wires. His latest release is Exo-Cognitive Matrix, a four-song EP.

All of this music has been released in less than two years, so there’s not that much stylistic evolution to be heard. The Xenobiotic Annihilation Doctrine EP lays out the template, which is basically chugging, technically complex death metal that reminds me of Wormed or Defeated Sanity. Kara is a really good drummer and bassist, and a competent guitarist. There are occasional jazzy bass passages, but no squiggly guitar solos, just riffs. So many riffs. I like the fact that the snare drum sounds like a snare drum, and not like a metal ring being hit with a hammer. There are a few quiet moments here and there, where Kara actually lets the atmosphere breathe, instead of hitting you with a dialogue sample from some horror movie, and he’s got one production trick I really like where everything drops out except the guitar, and that’s muffled like it’s coming through the wall from your neighbor’s apartment.

The muffled-guitar trick is absent on the new EP, which is unfortunate, but the vocals are great, a mixture of guttural demonic roars and anguished screams, and there are some other interesting touches, like a robotic voice reciting… something… in Hungarian. The whole thing blasts by in just 10 minutes — if you buy the entire Assimilated Transdimensionalization catalog on Bandcamp, like I did, you could fit it all on a single CD.

Support BA! Burning Ambulance is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit. Donations to us are tax deductible under Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 170, and we are qualified to receive tax deductible bequests, devises, transfers, and gifts under sections 2055, 2106, or 2522. Support us through Fractured Atlas or BurningAmbulance.com, or by buying our CDs or becoming a paying subscriber! Everything helps!

Organist Larry Goldings, guitarist Peter Bernstein, and drummer Bill Stewart have been making music together for 35 years. I believe their first album was Intimacy Of The Blues, released on the Minor Music label in 1991 as the Larry Goldings Trio, with saxophonist David “Fathead” Newman guesting on three tracks. They’ve also recorded under Bernstein’s name, and served as a backing band for other artists. But somewhere around 15 years ago, they started billing themselves under all three of their names. Anyway, Rhombus is their six hundredth album or so, and it’s a collection of nice, pretty tunes, some of which you may recognize. They play Keith Jarrett’s “Everything That Lives, Laments,” Randy Weston’s “Hi-Fly,” Thelonious Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” Wayne Shorter’s “Penelope,” Irving Berlin’s “They Say It’s Wonderful,” and Abdullah Ibrahim’s “Mamma,” along with two original compositions. Everybody plays clean, and nobody lurches sideways into free jazz or psychedelic rock, though Goldings’ “Rhombus” gets close. It almost sounds like a Doors instrumental, or some of John Zorn’s recent music for organ trio, so of course it’s the shortest piece on the record. There are a few unexpected bursts of energy from Stewart on the Irving Berlin number, too. It probably seems like I’m dismissing this record, but look up at the title of this newsletter again. This is an album you need to hear, because these three men know each other like brothers, and they do their collective thing brilliantly. They’ve chosen tunes that allow each person room to make a statement without Making a Statement, and sequenced them in a way that flows. It’s an album that understands how albums work. It’s one of the best examples of craft I’ve heard all year. And it snuck up on me; I didn’t decide to share it with you until I’d heard it three times.

Alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill loved writing for saxophone quartet, and later for saxophone sextet, occasionally adding flutes and clarinets to ensembles as needed. He co-founded the World Saxophone Quartet with fellow members of the Black Artist Group (BAG) Hamiet Bluiett and Oliver Lake, plus David Murray. After leaving the WSQ, he formed his own ensembles and continued to perform saxophone choir music. On this 2CD set, Marty Ehrlich — who played on the Julius Hemphill Sextet albums Fat Man And The Hard Blues and Five Chord Stud — has assembled a pool of players including Allan Chase, Rob DeBellis, Brian Landrus, Andy Laster, Jeff Lederer, Lisa Parrott, and Jason Robinson to record all 40 of Hemphill’s saxophone quartet compositions. And they are absolutely compositions, with a beginning, a middle, and an end (OK, some of them fade out). The harmonies are stacked up beautifully, with Ellingtonian lushness and string quartet gravitas. There are solos, but they’re not the point — the orchestrations and conversations between horns are the point. Indeed, 11 of these pieces are under two minutes long; they’re intended as statements, potent and precise. At the same time, put a swinging drummer underneath these pieces and you’d have the whole room dancing.

I know – and you may know – Lesley Mok as a jazz drummer: a member of pianist Myra Melford’s Fire And Water Quintet, whose next album Sure Grand Out is arriving this month, who appeared on Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince, and made a terrific album, A Reflection Distorts Over Water, with saxophonist Camila Nebbia and pianist Marilyn Crispell. Mok’s first album as a leader, 2023’s The Living Collection, had horns, strings, and electronics. Transient, on the other hand, is an almost entirely electronic effort. Yes, it features live drums, most obviously on “in the funhouse,” but they seem to be used as source material more than anything else. They’re often surrounded by electronic patterns, reshaped by studio effects, and otherwise disguised or downplayed. When I listen to this album, particularly on speakers (as opposed to headphones, which is my usual listening practice), I’m reminded of Autechre, but also of early Tangerine Dream and even of ultra-minimalist early 2000s works by electronic music artists like Bernhard Günter, Sogar, Taylor Deupree and Motion. I’m particularly impressed by the deep but precise low-end pulses on “midland.”

Sulida is a Norwegian trio — Marthe Lea on tenor sax, flute and percussion; Jon Rune Strøm on bass; Dag Erik Knedal Andersen on drums — whose debut album, Utos, was released on the recently shuttered Clean Feed label in 2024. The following year, they played a concert with trumpeter Axel Dörner, which has now been released as Etiwe. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in; I had this idea of Dörner in particular as a “lowercase” improviser, the kind of guy who makes very soft hissing and kissing noises into the trumpet rather than, you know, playing music through it. But this is very definitely a type of free jazz, one that reminds me at certain points of Other Dimensions In Music, at others of Irreversible Entanglements, and at others of the work of Don Cherry, whether with Ornette Coleman’s quartet, with Sonny Rollins, or with his own groups in Scandinavia in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Dörner fits right in with the ensemble, never feeling like a “special guest” or like he’s being deferred to. Strøm and Andersen are an excellent team, creating forward momentum without “swinging” in the conventional sense, as the horns carry on intriguing conversations. And when Lea begins to sing, Dörner is a friendly shadow/interlocutor, spurring her on.