Various Artists - Yearbook

Rastascan

A turbid dive into new music, this release packs everything from free-form, jazz-like scraw to variations in composition structure and situation, to solo exploration. Works of Henry Kaiser, the Splatter Trio, and the Molecules mesh with those of lesser-known folk in various musical genres. Scot Gresham-Lancaster's "(Raw) Machine with Meat" is a collage of creative editing, resulting in a collision of technology and acoustics. Doug Haire's "Sonic Desert" is a journalesque layer cake of improv, car horns, and field recordings. And Tom Djll's "Dream Band" is a plunderphonic jazz-metal stomp; snipped bits of other musics ciphered into viscera. Essential.

Patrick Barber