CARL is a baritone sax/bass duo from Houston (Danny Kamins and Andrew Durham) merging free jazz doom metal, and noise/drone. CARL finds itself in a space between the discomfort, anxiety, and bile of noise music and the abstraction and artistic intentions of improvisational music. This recording is hard to access and not easy to classify. Speaking for ourselves, it is our intention to obscure the feeling of human intent and even human presence. This is a direct reaction to the alienation and post-modern angst Houston produces, feelings that are specially heavy looking out at the fantastic architecture of the city’s many refineries. To steal a line from Roberto Bolano, the city is more like a cemetery than a city, not a cemetery in 2001 or 2016, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.
Scrambler is a large improvising ensemble conducted by Christian Pincock using the Sound Painting vocabulary of Walter Thompson.
Macaw is the Beefheartian guitar/drums duo of Jeb Polstein and Tom Scully.
Neil Welch plays solo improvisations for saxophone and electronics.