(Avant-Garde / Free Improvisation / Experimental) Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans - Electric Fruit {Thirsty Ear Rec. THI 57196, USA} - 2011, FLAC (image+.cue) lossless

Exact Audio Copy V0.99 prebeta 5 from 4. May 2009
EAC extraction logfile from 26. August 2011, 21:17
Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans / Electric Fruit
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REM GENRE "Experimental Jazz"
REM DATE 2011
REM DISCID 4D0CD106
REM COMMENT "ExactAudioCopy v0.99pb5"
PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
TITLE "Electric Fruit"
FILE "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans - Electric Fruit.flac" WAVE
  TRACK 01 AUDIO
    TITLE "Mangosteen 3000 A.D."
    PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
    INDEX 01 00:00:00
  TRACK 02 AUDIO
    TITLE "The Stench of Cyber-Durian"
    PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
    INDEX 00 08:54:62
    INDEX 01 08:58:13
  TRACK 03 AUDIO
    TITLE "The Pseudocarp Walks Among Us"
    PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
    INDEX 00 20:17:24
    INDEX 01 20:19:64
  TRACK 04 AUDIO
    TITLE "Scuppernong Malfunction"
    PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
    INDEX 00 24:40:23
    INDEX 01 24:42:15
  TRACK 05 AUDIO
    TITLE "Yantok Salak Kapok"
    PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
    INDEX 00 31:32:48
    INDEX 01 31:35:22
  TRACK 06 AUDIO
    TITLE "Metallic Dragon Fruit"
    PERFORMER "Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans"
    INDEX 00 47:08:66
    INDEX 01 47:13:55

By CLIFFORD ALLEN
Published: March 18, 2011
Weasel Walter / Mary Halvorson / Peter Evans
Electric Fruit
Thirsty Ear
2011
Percussionist and improviser Weasel Walter often uses the term "face rip" to describe a particularly intense musical experience. In improvised music, you often don't get a "blood and guts" approach; free jazz, in many instances, has been squeezed to the point that to remain relevant, it must often have structured erudition applied to it. That's understandable, of course—rarely can a musician go for 40 years blowing his or her lungs out and not look for something else to do, and while it is "something," free blowing is not "everything."
Giving it your all doesn't necessarily mean with eviscerating intensity, but that being said, in much historically challenging music, there has become an aspect of staidness that is tough to fight off. A look at the linguistic tropes Walter uses to describe the music available on his ugExplode label website—"fury," "speed," "agitation," "extremities," "energy"—gives a basic idea of what he's going for, along with album titles like Revenge, Invasion, Blood of the Earth, Revolt Music or Destroy All Music. It's a far cry from the spirituality or wry obscurity peppering free music from America and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, instead proffering an aesthetic battleground. Whether or not that sense of confrontation is relevant in a grayish pluralistic society such as exists at this point, the sentiment is nevertheless not lost.
Walter first became known around Chicago in the early 1990s with The Flying Luttenbachers, a punk-free jazz combo that first featured veteran multi-instrumentalist Hal Russell; later conscripts included saxophonists Chad Organ, Michael Colligan, and Ken Vandermark, guitarists Chuck Falzone and Dylan Posa, bassist Kurt Johnson, and many others. Spending the first decade of the new millennium in the Bay Area, he worked more regularly in free improvisation with artists such as bassist Damon Smith, guitarist Henry Kaiser and reedmen Aram Shelton and Elliott Levin, as well as punk bands like Burmese and XBXRX. Now based in New York, he's integrated himself into that environment, co-leading a group with former Cecil Taylor Unit drummer Marc Edwards and working with a slightly younger generation of expanded-technique free players. Two of those co-conspirators are guitarist Mary Halvorson and trumpeter Peter Evans, whom he joined forces with while still in the East Bay; Electric Fruit is their first official album together, though he's collaborated with each on record previously, and it's also his first appearance on the Thirsty Ear label.
It's easy to intellectualize the work of Halvorson and Evans, to an extent—they're both part of a coterie of young musicians whose work falls into the "extended technique" bag, though of course that's not all they are capable of. Evans uses circular breathing, multiphonics, chuffs and flicks as part of a language relating to the work of such avant-garde trumpet pioneers as Bill Dixon and Toshinori Kondo, as well as contemporaries Axel Dörner and Nate Wooley. Mary Halvorson's approach to the guitar (she's also an excellent composer) is peppered with wide interval leaps, alternate tunings and volume-pedal chicanery; she's worked in the ensembles of composer-reedman Anthony Braxton as well as in the math-rock band People, so her pedigree is extraordinarily diverse. In practice, and combined with the utterly detailed, often angular approach in Walter's percussion work, the level of fleet interaction is quite staggering, yet seems distant from the free-action intensity of some of Walter's more skronky ensembles.
While the music is continually active, there is a sense of space to it, an oddly condensed openness or latticework that, from a percussive angle, is reminiscent of Paul Lovens' "selected and unselected" drum and cymbal work and its constant flow of gestured clatter. Trumpet, guitar and drums don't necessarily evoke the same vision of density as a reeds-bass-drums outfit or, for that matter, a heavyweight piano trio. Nevertheless, moderate volume and a constancy of improvising contribute to a rather thick overall effect, coupled with an extraordinary array of contrasts.
Spiky flits set the stage on "Mangosteen 3000 A.D." and quickly erupt into a wide, circular swath of trumpet peals and fuzz guitar, Evans moving into an area of Lester Bowie-esque darts and bravura ever denser against refracting six-string swirl. Halvorson and Evans carve a holding pattern of repetition against thick bash, but that's gone in an instant with damped rattle and puckered whine. Actions move so quickly that they're difficult to recount even if one is paying attention; classically-poised brass and distorted inversions are joined at the hip by Walter's coppery plink and terse rustle. Even when the drums drop out at seven-odd minutes in for a trumpet-guitar duet, Evans fills his statements with clambering verbosity so any respite is slight indeed.
Speed is an important fact of this music, and in the hands of players with technique in spades, it can be a bit of a daunting experience—but that's not to say there aren't hints of bona fide melodicism on display here. Halvorson weaves a psychedelic, reverberating carpet underneath Evans' hot valve blasts in the introductory minutes of "The Stench of Cyber-Durian" and puts gauze into the proceedings, only to return with raucous distortion against a tumbling drum-and-bugle corps. For the most part, the three retain links to what their instruments "should" sound like at their loosest, though at times indeterminate metallic pierces could have either cymbal or breath-orientation. As choppy as Halvorson's pedal-actuated movements are, their origin is clear even as the poles reverse from meaty hacking to Billy Bauer-like strums or wiry koto-derived harmonics, and Evans at his most guttural and strange is still, at heart, a trumpeter with a very crisp attack and an understanding of the instrument's traditions.
This is, like all of Walter's groups, a very democratic ensemble and any discussion of Electric Fruit should focus on that fact—as forthright a drummer as he is, Walter is a player who listens very well and whether supporting or ricocheting off his bandmates' phrases, his improvising is far from the music's lone focal point. That being said, on "Scuppernong Malfunction" the roto-tom patter, woodblock needling and snare bombast he pushes through around feedback and Evans' clarion salvos is difficult not to take notice of, moving the collective direction from swaying shards to syrupy thud. This is incredibly direct music and, while not "rough around the edges" in the same way that Walter's other work often is, Electric Fruit has an undeniable presence and reflects what's both doable and necessary at this point in time.

Editorial Reviews:
Review:
"... a non-stop stream of performance featuring [Walter's] splattery flail, free-jazz caveman pile-ups, and acutely crusty edge." --The Village Voice
Product Description:
Taken together, these three young musicians represent the best of a coming generation of new talent with the NY Times and the Village Voice calling them "dazzling and light years ahead of their peers". Mary Halvorson, Peter Evans and Weasel Walter, forge a frenetic, yet painterly style of modern improvisational music, imbued with the intense speed and density of information that modern civilization faces. The playersâ TM distinct instrumental voices weave labyrinthine strands of counterpoint. The music is brisk, strange and articulate, presenting a dry and bizarre sense of humor and play.
Customer Review:
4.0 out of 5 stars - Weasel's session, March 23, 2011
By: Erich M. Hager "riff conway" (Buffalo, NY)
While Mary Halvorson is featured along with Peter Evans throughout, this disc really seems like the drummer's. He guides the music in all sorts of directions and his playing is exemplary. Halvorson does her trademark runs with her pitch-bending effect and Evans manages some gutteral percussive attacks on his horn that contrasts nicely with his solos. It's a good one.

Weasel Walter - Mary Halvorson - Peter Evans : Electric Fruit
"Electric Fruit" alludes to the vexing encounter between nature and technology, one of the most complex issues that we face as a global society. The album brings together a powerhouse of innovators—Weasel Walter, Mary Halvorson and Peter Evans—to emphatically capture, question and explore the throes of this crucial contradiction. "Electric Fruit" is a stirring and potent recording of the dangerous confrontation between the innate and the artificial, the organic and the robotic. Each member of the trio brings their peculiarities, problems and powers to the table for a passionate discourse on the demands and constraints of modern music and the world.
The album features Peter Evans’s intrepid explorations of the sonic possibilities of the trumpet, as he delivers yet another performance that crackles with wit and boundless energy. Mary Halvorson’s alkaline, wiry guitar lines lend an angular linearity to the forms and force structural direction while displaying a tart sense of deliberate dissonance. Weasel Walter erects maniacal, asymmetrical frameworks for his band mates to dart in and out of as his transparent, high-velocity drum approach creates constant momentum and simultaneously implies multiple directions. The players’ distinct instrumental voices weave labyrinthine strands of counterpoint at rapid paces, intentionally intersecting and negating each other from moment to moment in attempt to reach as many disparate points of structural coherence as possible.
The group forges a frenetic, yet painterly style of modern improvisational music imbued with intense speed and density. The music is brisk, strange and articulate, presenting a dry and bizarre sense of humor and play. The goal of the group is to create a new kind of music beyond idiom, with maximum intellect, reaction and musicality.
Already established leaders in their own right, Walter, Halvorson and Evans represent the best of a coming generation of talent. Having performed throughout the United States and Europe for the past several years, the trio now presents its debut studio recording, “Electric Fruit.”
About the Artists:
Drummer Weasel Walter is best known as leader of and primary composer for the long- running cult punk band The Flying Luttenbachers. Living in Chicago, the Bay Area, and most recently New York, Walter has spent the past two decades bridging numerous factions within the experimental music scene. He has performed with seminal noise-rock bands like Lake Of Dracula, Burmese and XBXRX, maintaining all the while his career as a free improviser. Walter has collaborated with luminaries such as Marshall Allen, Evan Parker, Henry Kaiser, Jim O’Rourke, G. Calvin Weston, Mick Barr, Ken Vandermark, William Winant, Kevin Drumm, Darius Jones, Vinny Golia and many others. Walter is also a current member of the noted NYC avant-garde ensemble Zs, the technical metal band Behold . . . The Arctopus, the no-wave trio Cellular Chaos and an ensemble he co-leads with drummer Marc Edwards.
Guitarist Mary Halvorson has been active in the New York music scene since 2002. She plays with two of her own bands, The Mary Halvorson Trio and Quintet, and co-leads a chamber music duo with violist Jessica Pavone. Mary also comprises one half of the avant-rock band People with drummer Kevin Shea. She is a veteran of Anthony Braxton’s ensembles, and has performed with Tim Berne, Taylor Ho Bynum, Trevor Dunn, Tomas Fujiwara, Tony Malaby, Myra Melford, Marc Ribot, Matana Roberts, Elliott Sharp and John Tchicai, among others. Mary is “the most original jazz guitarist to emerge this decade,” “the freshest…most critically acclaimed…slinger out of downtown Manhattan/Brooklyn right now” (Peter Margasak, Chicago Reader, Howard Mandel, Jazz Beyond Jazz).
Trumpeter Peter Evans moved to New York City in 2003 after graduating from Oberlin Conservatory with a degree in classical trumpet. In addition to leading his own ensembles, Evans performs with groups ranging from terrorist-bebop unit Mostly Other People Do the Killing to trumpeter Nate Wooley and the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE). Recent recordings include a 2-disc set of solo trumpet music, "Nature/ Culture,” as well as "Live in Lisbon,” an album of quartet music recorded at the Jazz em Agosto Festival 2009. Other collaborators include Steve Beresford, Okkyung Lee, Keiji Haino, Jim Black, Evan Parker, Tyshawn Sorey, Tony Buck and Christian Marclay.