drjazzpolice
Writing about music always feels a little like whistling about love for me, you’re only scratching the surface of the real thing. This album, like the best albums, took me places. Not to a place, but multiple places. The world is an unkind place to artists, especially niche artists like these, and I just want to be kind to these particular artists, who are doing the thing — plunging into the unknown for the love of it, for the important thing that happens when it works — and tell them fuck yeah.
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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Vinyl pressed by Physical Music Products in Nashville, TN. Lacquers cut by JJ Golden. Plates made at RTI. 28 pt. "Old Style" Tip-On Jackets printed by Stoughton in City of Industry, CA.
Includes unlimited streaming of Mind Screen
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Download available in 16-bit/44.1kHz.
ships out within 7 days
Purchasable with gift card
$25USDor more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Includes "Old Style" Tip-On Jacket Vinyl LP + Emergency Group tour t-shirt
Includes unlimited streaming of Mind Screen
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
The newest phase for Emergency Group might not seem terribly radical to some, but Mind Screen spins the Brooklyn quartet in quietly exciting new directions as they channel their thrilling high-wire improv into their first extended studio visit. For starters (and closers), Mind Screen begins and ends with songs. An improv unit from their very first February 2020 session (just in time to not play again for over a year), the band hadn’t resisted composed material so much as never tried it. When the group entered Brooklyn’s Figure 8 in July 2023, it was with a pair of tunes and the gentle guidance of Chris Schlarb, also their first time working with a producer.
The soaring noir of the title track (by keyboardist Robert Boston) and the bolero ballad “Julien” (by guitarist Jonathan Byerley, for his young son) both zoom in on aspects of the band’s collectively developed voice, channeling the possibilities of improv into (slightly) more fixed spaces. The tunes act as bookends for the core of the Figure 8 session, a pair of more “typical” Emergency Group adventures, if anything could be said to be typical of a band that’s only really been in active existence a little over two years. Which it can’t.
It would feel slightly wrong using the word “chance” anywhere in a description of the Emergency Group’s improvisations if not for the visceral sensation I get whenever I’ve seen them perform live of something unseen being thrown into the air and breaking apart in the moment that they start to play. Or, rather, the feeling I get in the expectant half-second before they start to play, because then everything goes into motion, pulses colliding and overlapping and interlocking and generating new ideas. But on Mind Screen’s two extended pieces, the feeling is less of propulsion but of a quartet floating back together with intention into gentler orbits, of picking from the possibilities without losing a sense of adventure or the sense that everything could suddenly lose momentum and turn back into empty air.
“What’s Yours Is Mine” isn’t a ballad so much as a mode played in 9 (at the suggestion of bassist Dave Mandl), a drifting late-night mood that finds tenderness in small internal dialogues. And even on “Spirit Logic” where the Group finds heat, steered into form by drummer Andreas Brade, they break again into star-stuff. During the extended denouement (en route to “Julien”), Mind Screen reveals the warmth of Emergency Group in repose, a bed of tones and confident uncertainty, taking a breath before turning the next corner.
–Jesse Jarnow, Brooklyn, New York
credits
released July 5, 2024
Robert Boston - Keys
Andreas Brade - Drums
Jonathan Byerley - Guitar
Dave Mandl - Bass
Produced and Mixed by Chris Schlarb at BIG EGO, Long Beach, CA.
Recorded at Figure 8, Brooklyn, New York on July 17th, 2023
Engineered by Michael Hammond
Mastered by JJ Golden
Cover artwork by Jaime Zuverza
Photography by Chris Schlarb
Layout by David J. Woodruff
“Mind Screen” written by Robert Boston Published by Entropee Music (ASCAP)
“What’s Yours is Mine” and “Spirit Logic” written by
Robert Boston, Andreas Brade, Jonathan Byerley, and Dave Mandl Published by Entropee Music (ASCAP), ABDRUMS (ASCAP), Western Revisions (ASCAP) and Millette Music (ASCAP)
“Julien” written by Jonathan Byerley,
Published by Western Revisions (ASCAP)
Copyright Emergency Group and BIG EGO Records 2024
