Gerald Cleaver - The Process

Drummer/producer Gerald Cleaver is back in the room with another ode to his beloved Detroit. Indeed, the city is like a second member on The Process, its weighty history of vanguard-defining electronic experimentation and jazz-time inclinations writ large across a restless, journeying single 35 minute track split across two sides. It's an aptly named record, too, having been reassembled and re-worked from a previously unreleased older song into something very supple and future-fwd. We've not the original to compare, though there is a sense of fluidity in the production that feels lithe and fluent, a living text if you like. Because Cleaver is a drummer first, the ear tends to lead in that direction, but the control of tone and texture throughout is continuously inspired, shifting alien synth lines and dystopian/utopian midnight vistas that sit right up there on the top table with the likes of Theo Parrish, Carl Craig, Robert Hood et al. That it's written in long form is even more impressive, the kind of record designed to be performed, a mutated E2-4 where the beginning, middle and end are irrelevant as it's always positioned in the eternal continuum of an imagined Detroit. Nailed on classic.