At some parts dense and heavy, but mostly spacious and always gripping, the eleven compositions ebb and flow, stab and caress, shake and sedate, with assertiveness, consistency and wistfulness that convey a sense of a ritual and sometimes a prayer.
Nighttime. Outside, a storm goes wild. No sign of people in the streets, the rain pours down hard. Lightning pierces the dark sky, thunder rumbles. Somewhere, in the past, in the middle of a raging sea, down in an old ship’s squeaking bilge, or maybe far away on a haunted island, deep inside a secret mountain cave, a priest or maybe a witch doctor, performs some kind of ancient ritual—an exorcism or maybe an evocation.
Quatorze Pièces de Menace is Dale Cooper Quartet & the Dictaphones’ second album for the mighty Denovali imprint, and third in total. The images it conjures up are strange, eerie, mystical, and of course, menacing.
The music is not constricted by structures, it does not obey any rules. The flow is free, unpredictable and occasionally wild. At some parts dense and heavy, but mostly spacious and always gripping, the eleven compositions ebb and flow, stab and caress, shake and sedate, with assertiveness, consistency and wistfulness that convey a sense of a ritual and sometimes a prayer. Saxophones howl, guitars weep and saw, keyboards shimmer, odd effects strike with fierceness. Ghostly, lyrically-infused vocals bewitch, a trumpet croons, strokes of drums pound.
The textural quality makes the music sound as if it was recorded down in an old castle’s dungeon or haunted corridors. Diving into Quatorze Pièces de Menace requires a dark, stormy winter night, maybe even a cup of tea or a glass of wine and a few candles. It is certainly easier to dive into its depths this way. Easily digested? No. Worth being a part of a colorful music collection? Definitely. Dark jazz at its most hallucinatory form.
Quatorze Pièces de Menace is available on Denovali.
