Selvhenter - Mesmerizer

The Danish four piece return from a near-decade of silence for this first long player on Hands in the Dark. It's a fitting new home given HITD's long-standing affiliation with Tomaga, to my ears the band to whom Selvhenter bears most obvious comparison. With two drummers, there's a similar focus on nuanced percussion and polyrhythms, and as a four, they display comparatively fluid regard for genre, abrasive electronics, improv instincts and kraut futurism colliding with open-ended intent. Still, it's no simple like-for-like comparison. While highly abstract(ed) at times, Mesmerizer can also be direct and propulsive, displaying an energy not unlike if The Thing, the Natural Information Society or the Oren Ambarchi Mark Fell collab, Oglon Day, were distilled to fragmentary pieces, a series of parts ever ascending to some unreachable arc or plain. Cerebral of course, but don't be mistaken, for this is very much physical music that demands the live arena, the sonorities of the saxophone and trombone hitting hard and heavy, aligning that crossover between free jazz and noise music absolution.