Bluffs
- 艺人
- Altered States
- 语种
- 英语
- 厂牌
- Innocent
- 发行时间
- 2005年01月01日
- 专辑类别
- 录音室专辑
专辑介绍
by Dave Lynch
In an age when many people think of cellphone ring tones as "music," there's something comforting about Bluffs, the 2005 two-CD magnum opus by Japanese guitar/bass/drums trio Altered States: the longest track is over 53 minutes long (a challenge for ADD sufferers, to be sure). For your additional consideration, said 53-minute track is entirely improvised, as are all the pieces (given catchy titles like "One," "Two," "Three," "Four" -- you get the idea) on Bluffs. In the interest of full disclosure, it should also be stated that guitarist Uchihashi Kazuhisa, bassist Nasuno Mitsuru, and drummer Yoshigaki Yasuhiro are fully capable of concision; the shortest track ("Seven," which concludes disc two) is only three and a half minutes in length. But there is a particular pleasure in hearing this band stretch out, and remain endlessly inventive, for nearly an hour. Kazuhisa's name should be mentioned in the same breath as any electric guitar god you'd care to name -- Fripp, Torn, and Frisell are three who immediately come to mind -- with true mastery of a battery of effects that are somehow never overused and never become clichéd. Kazuhisa often has a massive celestial tone and is particularly skilled with a delay pedal, creating loops that he, Mitsuru, and Yasuhiro improvise both with and against. However, despite the looping, Kazuhisa's arpeggios, and Mitsuru's ostinato basslines, Altered States are never overly beholden to repetitive vamps; they know when to stretch out into vast stretches of space or move into new rhythmic territories, and they have an almost telepathic ability to navigate one change after another, organically and seamlessly. The aforementioned 53-minute "Two" fades to a single sustained tone at about the half-hour mark, and the remainder of the track builds in intensity with a slow escalation of tension that sonically recalls live King Crimson circa Starless and Bible Black. "Two" could have been split into separate tracks for indexing purposes, but kudos to the band for keeping the piece intact in all its hugeness for artistic reasons -- this is meant to be experienced as a single improvisation, and Altered States are to be commended for not enabling the listener to subvert their intention by chopping "Two" in two (or into even smaller bits).
Plus, the second disc offers plenty of opportunities for briefer encounters with Altered States, although it too has an arc that encourages straight-through listening without interruption. The second disc arguably presents a fuller range of everything Altered States have to offer in their universe of improvisation, beginning with the floating space jazz of "One," in which Yasuhiro plays untethered trumpet lines suggesting Mark Isham or even Miles floating in the ether surrounded by the random skitterings of guitar, bass, and percussion. "Four" is an all-out psych rock jam that crams so many Gongish and Hendrixian changes in its eight minutes that you can easily imagine Altered States rehearsing this particular piece for hours and hours in advance -- but of course, they didn't. And if you're looking for curve balls, "Six" begins in a rattling string-bending country barnyard before tumbling through noise rock, spacy free-form improvisation, power rock, psychedelia, and funk over the course of its nearly 17 minutes. The back cover of Bluffs notes that Altered States have been together since 1989, and one could almost imagine them playing a fantastically varied continuous improvisation n throughout all those years since first plugging in, if flesh-and-blood creatures didn't have to take breaks for eating, sleeping, and other necessities of the physical universe. Looking for the world's lengthiest ring tone? Altered States could no doubt provide it; hopefully you aren't expecting very many important calls.
最新简评（共1条）
- @玛布：双CD，缺少第二张头两首歌