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Pillow, "Plays Brötzmann"
2002 saw the release of two Peter Brötzmann related albums, both performed and recorded with his Chicago Tentet. Pillow member Fred Lonberg-Holm was part of that tentet and is joined by Michael Colligan, Liz Payne, and Ben Vida to re- imagine Brötzmann's "Images." An already difficult piece of music, Pillow rework this piece eleven times over, erecting a consistent, if drawn out, album.
Anyone who's heard Machine Gun will undoubtedly think of intensity and confrontation when the name Peter Brötzmann comes up. His style is audacious, bombastic, and all the more enjoyable for it. His work with the Chicago Tentet has been called, at various points, a bit more subdued than normal. While Images (released by Okka Disk) might've been quieter than normal, the versions as performed by Pillow are nothing like what I've heard by Brötzmann in the past. They are more meditative than anything he's belted out of his lungs on sax and, in fact, there's no sax to speak of anywhere in these recordings. Instead, an improvised rumbling subsists over 18 minutes of space, reshaping itself with the calls of trumpets, cellos, guitar, dry ice, and other instruments. Liz Payne's percussion is less percussive than it is environmental; it is a rapidly changing series of hiccups and metallic whines, like the wheezing of a giant printing press in its death throes.
True to many of Brötzmann's own proclivities, there are very few signs of melody and when they do appear they are a brief and welcome disturbance. For the majority of the time, this quartet plays with tonal qualities and stumbling rhythms, squeaking and shaking as much avant garde jazz does, but never exploding into rages like Brötzmann is so fond of doing (Brötzmann sometimes doesn't bother with quiet moments, continually destroying sound as he goes). The album flows together well enough, keeping a safe distance from the bland territory of material remixed over and over again for a single disc. While this saves the music from some redundancy, at certain points the random noise all becomes a bit monotonous, failing to summon up the excitement Brötzmann's playing has often evoked in me.
While my interest is piqued in small increments, I find my mind wandering during large portions of the record, my attention span drawn to what's happening around me instead of the music that's playing—there's nothing that stands out enough to keep me drawn inside the music. There are moments of beauty, especially when the cello parts stand out among the other sounds. It seems that the more meditative and withdrawn the band becomes, the more elegant and capable they sound. The last track is a great example of this, especially when compared to the other interpretations.
Taking in a piece of this record here and there can be entertaining, but as an album it fails to be consistently entertaining; it's status as a work of art is a topic beyond me. Though coherent, the album simply isn't varied enough to warrant the amount of time this band dedicates to this particular piece. "Images" was one half of a record, not a record itself.
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