Sam Gendel & Josiah Steinbrick - Mouthfeel / Serene

Beautiful and quixotic transmission from the LA underground courtesy of this Sam Gendel and Josiah Steinbrick collaboration issued by new label Full Bloom. Both Gendel and Steinbrick have been orbiting the outer edges of experimental music for some time now, having made some interesting records for Leaving, Hands in the Dark etc, yet there's something of the sui generis about this work that signals their arrival. As that suggests, it's tricky placing exactly where this fits. Gendel's saxophone playing does recall Hassell's trumpet manipulations, which brings with it the obvious fourth world connections that admittedly aren't a million miles off the mark, and there's a touch of musique concrete to its ghostly sound of indeterminate origin feel. And yet there's something more notably contemporary about these compositions, marrying the world of improv and ECM-styled jazz with modern electronics, not too dissimilar to that brilliant Pavel Milyakov & Bendik Giske collab from earlier in the year and some of the output from Faitiche (namely those Andrew Pekler records). It's a supple and elusive listen, shifting shape and sliding through fingers, doing that hypnagogic thing of never sounding quite the same on each listen. Kinda been blindsided by this one, though it's exactly the kinda thing you'd be hoping to emerge from the experimental underground in 2021.