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Subtle Lip Can is a trio consisting of Bernard Falaise [guitar], Joshua Zubot [violin] and Isaiah Ceccarelli [percussion]. All three are members of Montréal’s fervent improvisational community. The textures they create are unique, rich and cover a wide dynamic scope, from contemplative soundscapes to frantic climaxes.
From a self-professed failed polygote, instagram photographer, and an adamant non-facebook user, comes this intimate, imitative, mirror-pond of mammalian spring-songs. The Trio brews up a plethora of sonic phenomena that echoes Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories, Art Pepper's Wintermoon (more in the rhythmic sense), and melted melodic moments of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. These references are woven into a complex morphological lexicon that is intrinsic to the performers' fine-tuned intuitive capabilities. Overall, the album maintians its sense of authenticity in the way that the performers work with one another to reach a degree of catharsis.An esculent for audiophiles, Drime's refined spatial presence is quite palpable to the auditory nerve and as such, has the propensity to induce sporatic moments of subdued synaesthesia. Suble Lip Can's sophomore album, as the name suggests, pays its respects to tradition and is reflective of itself, suggesting that the trio has entered the Lacanian "mirror stage" in this phase of evolution. Punctual and accurate metamorphoses indicate that this caterpilar knows it will inevitably transform into a magnificient monarch.
Someone picking up Reflective Drime without having previously heard Subtle Lip Can might make certain inferences based on the cover details. Seeing that the group consists of Joshua Zubot (violin and mandolin), Bernard Falaise (guitar), and Isaiah Ceccarelli (drums/percussion), one might conceivably picture a trad-jazz trio riffing on tunes by Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt or some such thing. In like manner, track titles such as “Shuffle Stomp,” “Slam Hum,” and “Chackle Clast” could lead one to think the album might feature blues-based romps, be-bop, and concise solo statements by the string players supported by high-energy drum swing.
Well, all such expectations are certifiably dashed by the fifty-two-minute recording, which pursues an entirely other agenda from the one described above. Subtle Lip Can, which formed in 2007 and issued its eponymous debut album three years later, is no Hot Club of France, in other words. Laid down in 2013, Reflective Drime sees Zubot, Falaise, and Ceccarelli digging into ten improv-styled tracks with a hydra-headed unanimity of purpose.
The recording's uncompromisingly experimental tone is established early, with raw swathes of violin and guitar dragging themselves across a lumbering percussive carcass during “Siffer Shump.” Though comparatively more subdued, “Gull Plump Fiver” is no less alien in its overall comportment, though Falaise's playing does surprisingly flirt with jazz-styled melodicism in its textural shadings. In one seeming nod to conventionality, “Shuffle Stomp” includes wiry solos by Falaise and Zubot, albeit ones constantly besieged by the immolating undertow churning alongside. Elsewhere, crabby, atonal guitar shards butt up against glockenspiel tinklings and nocturnal violin scrapes in “Salk Hovered,” while “Chackle Clast” resembles some woozy convergence of spidery guitar picking and convulsive violin micro-textures.
Eschewing standard musical conventions of melody and rhythm, the trio burrows into its material, operating in a free-spirited improv zone and seemingly indifferent to notions of commercial potential or accessibility. Throughout the recording, the musicians appear intent on wresting from their instruments anything but the normal sounds associated with them. Put simply, Subtle Lip Can's pieces are less conventional compositions and more multi-limbed organisms undergoing nightmarish birth before one's ears. It ain't easy listening, as we like to call it, but the musical firmament should be large and open-ended enough to find a spot for the trio's highly individualized brand of experimental psychogeography. - TexturaThe first release back for Tanya Tagaq collaborator Jesse Zubot's newly (and thankfully) relaunched label Drip Audio keeps it in the family. Reflective Drime is the followup to Subtle Lip Can's eponymous 2010 debut, a project featuring Jesse's brother Joshua Zubot on violin alongside percussionist Isaiah Ceccarelli and guitarist Bernard Falaise. Unlike Animism, there is no opening Pixies cover to ease you into this album. It dives straight into the deep end, delivering an unrelenting assault of cacophonic timbre combinations, a blistering chaos of extended technique, scrapes and distortions, raw noise expressed through free jazz gestures.
While evocative and thoroughly artful, its longer, dissonant pieces like "Rommer Chanks" can be difficult to get through, but when they reign it in a touch for tracks like the eerie space jazz of "Gull Plump Fiver" or the album's sparse, droning closer "Too Pins Over," the humanity of the Montreal trio's endeavour can envelope your soul. It's powerful and terrifying to behold. Unflinchingly, Reflective Drime boasts the ability to turn sound into colors and vice versa, which may look cool on paper to those who occasionally chew blotter, but the reality of which can be a bit much to handle for even seasoned veterans. - Exclam!