Random Touch, the prolific avant-garde/free-jazz from Illinois, are back once again with their 14th release Reverberating Apparatus, another eclectic collection of assorted sounds and noises that for some will be quite hard to digest, but for others a wonderful adventure into the unknown.
This band is certainly not for everyone, but should you have an open mind to 'out there' jazz, prog, and avant-garde styles, there's actually some interesting things going on within their music. Reverberating Apparatus is a bubbling, boiling, cacophony of dissonance, as jagged shards of King Crimson-meets-Frank Zappa guitar noise battles tinkering piano and ramshakle drums & percussion, at times making completely no sense, but occasionally somewhat close to resembling melody. "Before the Beginning " is a perfect example of what this band has to offer , as Scott Hamill (guitar), James Day (keyboards), and Christopher Brown (drums/vocals) almost sound as if they have elastic bands attached to each other, with cannons of notes blasting from one to the other and yet in the end it almost makes pure jazzy sense. Though there are perhaps one too many tracks here filled with annoying vocal rambles and atmosphere that just lays there with no real purpose, the real meat & potatoes are the more free-jazz inflected numbers like "Fire Tending" (featuring some scorching guitar work from Hamill), "Threshold", "Home for Twilight", and the ethereal, almost space-rock sounding "Re-membering".
Reverberating Apparatus will without a doubt be an acquired taste, and even a casual avant-garde & free-jazz admirer like myself found moments on this one a tad tiresome, but there's enough to recommened here for those whose listening passions run off the beaten path. The band no doubt has plenty of talent, which they've shown many times over the years, but you just have to wonder if some day they might drop this highly abstract vision and create something a little more musical.
Track Listing
1. Home for Twilight 9:06
2. Before the Beginning 4:26
3. Apparitions of Revelry 2:15
4. Benevolent Outcomes 2:45
5. Fred Astaire-ing 5:17
6. Purloining the Memo 5:36
7. Approaching the Cusp 4:54
8. Fire Tending 3:29
9. Danger 3:52
10. Threshold 4:35
11. Re-membering 5:09
12. Gotta Go 1:05
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