No Neck Blues Band

YTIU [VINYL]

Label: KELIPPAH Country: USA

"No Neck Blues Band are the last of their kind, children of a New York City that no longer exists. They've operated in the shadows of Gothams music scene for almost twenty years as likely to perform in art galleries as loft spaces. No Neck Blues Band are revolutionaries, carrying on the search for freedom through improvisation that began after Coltrane liberated jazz. But No Neck Blues Band doesn't play jazz per se, or any other known idiom for that matter. Their sound has its precedents most notably the genre-blurring, early-70s work of England's Third Ear Band and German groups Exmagma and recent co-conspirators Embryo. No Neck Blues Band further those explorers investigations of non-Western sounds by infusing them with psychedelic-rock dynamics, the tenets of minimalism and Fluxus-inspired performance.

Each No Neck Blues Band record is a spontaneously composed ritual containing a variety of hard-to-pronounce acoustic instruments, unmoored percussion, guitars, keyboards and various electronics, at once familiar and exotic. No Neck Blues Band activity has been sparse in recent years since their celebrated rehearsal/performance space in Harlem, The Hint House, fell victim to gentrification.

Recorded in 2009 at Faust Studios in Germany, YTIU is the avant-gangs latest offering and finds them in one of their more accessible moods. Only during the second half of Side A's "Platinum Willows" does the band indulge its tendency for atonality. YTIU's second side fittingly dedicated to departed Pink Floyd member Richard Wright is a keyboard-dominated stunner that is more Saucerful of Secrets than The Wall."