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Nonkeen, "The Gamble"
This trio featuring ubiquitous pianist Nils Frahm is one of the more pleasant surprises that have come across my path in recent memory, as I expected some sort of bloodless avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but was instead treated to quite an innovative and unique album (albeit quite an understated one as well).  I suspect a lot of that success is due to the band's exceedingly unconventional recording process, as they spent 8 years recording, re-recording, editing, recombining, and endlessly tweaking these pieces before finally concluding that The Gamble was finished.  Consequently, whatever these songs sounded like when they were originally played is probably a hell of a lot different from what ultimately wound up here.  To my credit, I was right about this album being a sort of avant-jazz/post-rock hybrid, but all of the instrumentation is so blurred together that The Gamble transcends either genre entirely and instead sounds like a strain of dub techno that is just as influenced by Latin percussion as it is by Jamaican dub. Except when it sounds like the greatest album that Tortoise never recorded.  Or when it sounds like something else entirely.
If their colorful biography (featuring a major fairground ride tragedy) is to be believed, this trio of Nils Frahm, bassist Sepp Singwald, and drummer Frederic Gmeiner have been playing together since childhood.  Even more suspicious than the carousel tragedy, however, is the fact that their biography makes absolutely no mention of Übertonmensch, a previous band featuring the exact same line-up.  Instead, Nonkeen is framed as the culmination of a lifelong journey.  I suppose it probably is in some ways, but these guys are still quite an inscrutable bunch.  Their backstory and previous output go a long way towards explaining their current sound though, as the trio have flirted with both jazz and electronic music, but were originally brought together by their shared love of tape machines and their possibilities.  Consequently, it makes perfect sense that they would eventually shake free from more straightforward genre fare and embrace the studio as their true muse.
They also embraced current Miasmah artist Andrea Belfi, who contributes guest drums and percussion on five songs.  That certainly adds further to The Gamble's blurring effect, as it is impossible to say where Belfi's contributions end and where Gmeiner's begin, especially since no instrument credits are provided except for Belfi.  In fact, it is entirely possible that Belfi steals the show, as two of his five songs are among the best on the album ("Animal Farm" and "Chasing God Through Palmyra").  Naturally, everyone's contributions swirl together at all times, but Nonkeen are at their absolute best when their hazy almost-jazz is driven by a strong pulse.  "Animal Farm," for example, boasts a very cool organ-like chord progression and a nice slowed-down tape loop of a male voice, but it is the sexy Latin groove that makes it seem like a bombshell compared to the earlier songs on the album (especially when the beat takes on an ominous, industrial texture).  The album's lead single, "Chasing God Through Palmyra," is equally Latin-tinged, tape loop-enhanced, and quasi-industrial, but even more propulsive.  In fact, I believe both pieces were culled from many of the same parts, but "God" is a bit more sped up and consequently feels quite different.  Elsewhere, the tensely clattering and improvisatory-sounding "Ceramic People" is another high point, benefiting from some fairly wild live drumming.  The Belfi-less closer ("Re: Turn!") might actually be my favorite piece of all though, sounding like a dreamy treatment of a simple, repeating piano motif that calls to mind a hallucinatory reimagining of Steve Reich’s "Music for 18 Musicians."
My sole grievance with The Gamble is just that it has much more filler than I would expect on a 9-song album that took 8 years to make: not much happens at all in either "Capstan" (sounds like someone noodling on a vibraphone while someone else practices drum rolls) or "Pink Flirt" (a few melancholy chords, some tape hiss, and a prematurely aborted good idea).  Otherwise, however, Nonkeen seem to have had plenty of fine ideas in a number of different directions, yet made them seamlessly fit together with an unwavering commitment to space, mood, and understatement.  I was especially struck by how ego-less this album is, as few things are rarer than getting three musicians with reasonably solid jazz chops together in a room and having them all try to smear together unrecognizably in service of a smoky, dub-wise aesthetic.  Even when Nonkeen sound like an actual jazz trio, as they do on the excellent "Beautiful Mess" and "The Saddest Continent on Earth," it sounds like a noir-ish afterhours jam designed not to wake any neighbors.  Equally significant is the fact that I never would have ever guessed on my own that The Gamble featured a pianist of Frahm's caliber: not because the playing is unexceptional, but because Nonkeen somehow manage to make everything feel so seemingly effortless, simple, and natural.
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