Cover art by Vera Brüggemann
OCD044 : Cassini Flyby / Grand Finale
Grand Finale sees the avant garde experimental jazz rock prog trio lead by Chris Jones going further in their explorations. The combination gives us at time relax moods, at time very nervous inflections. Based around the story of the probe Cassini...a true journey!
In 2016 Tom Clarke (drums), Peter Marsh (bass & electronics) and Chris Jones (guitars) – all veterans of London's improvisational/experimental music scene - began regular sessions in the heart of London's Brixton. Combining a shared love of jazz, krautrock, Canterbury and electronica, the band began exploring the possibilities of improvisation, but combined with a strong rhythmic undertow.
Simultaneously, NASA's Cassini-Huygens probe, which had begun its own exploratory journey nearly 20 years beforehand, had entered the final phase of its mission: a series of data-gathering 'flybys' of Saturn and its satellites. During the band's earliest sessions, the probe was regularly sending back sublime and awe-inspiring images of our Solar System that seemed to mirror the ominous yet driving aesthetic at the heart of the trio's music. Suddenly, the band had a name…
Like all semi-improvised music, this was a delicate balancing act between form and chaos; between the solid and the ethereal. At the beginning of 2017, Tom and Peter entered Baby Microbe studios in Brixton to record a set of backing tracks which were subsequently sent to Chris; now living in Northern Germany. Guitar overdubs were recorded in Germany and then taken back to London to be mixed.
The Cassini mission's final approach toward Saturn's surface was known as the 'Grand Finale': a carefully pre-planned and audacious dance between the various moons and rings of the giant planet that ended in a fiery plunge into the super-dense atmosphere. This combination of daring, science and auto-destruction also plays out in the band's debut album. From the vastness of space to the microscopic click's and buzzes of digital circuitry under duress, Grand Finale is a wild ride into the unknown…
Digital release on the 18th of October 2019.
Track listing:
1: Full Steam Ahead
2: You Know, We Can Never Come from This
3: F Ring 1
4: Picnic with Rhea
5: Dark Titan
6: Shitstorm on Tethys
7: F Ring 2
8: Final Dive
9: Intension
10: Enceladusian Birds (Bonus track)
11: Polar Hexagon (Bonus track)
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