Ben Watson on COFFEE AT MILANOS
“It’s very direct, very melodic, and it sounds like a bunch of demos recorded by visitors from outer space who have just encountered jazz and are demonstrating what they’ve found to an interplanetary alien space station crew of investigative analysts.You see, what kills music is THEATRE, the sequencing of brute effect according to narrative … Wagner, Pink Floyd, Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, David Bowie. What I crave is collective union of attention to musical detail: to the intricacies and intimacies of players’ establishing harmony and rhythm; unstitching the inherited garment and playing with frayed edges and weird worlds of thread. Or, to change metaphors, what I hear in COFFEE AT MILANOS is the dissecting scalpel of player intelligence cutting through the skin surface of “music” to expose pumping arteries and zinging nerve cells and replicating blood corpuscles. Close focus on the stuff of music itself.”