The Chinese Restaurants - Instant Music

Almost a year to the day since its release in the US and we finally have copies in the shop (along with loads of other Ever/Never stock - more info soon). The cost of transatlantic shipping be damned, we got there in the end! And the same can be said of The Chinese Restaurants themselves, a partnership between Richard and Keith 'Restaurant' formed in '96 who got around to making their debut record 23 years after the fact, and then they only took three days to make it. It's a fitting backstory, given this is music that is both rich with the spirit of improv (ala Cornelius Cardew/AMM) and the reductionist immediacy of punk, and yet also the product of learned artists who are highly adept and laser guided. Nothing is planned and nothing is an accident (the didactic of improv?), this is the paradox within which Instant Music is suspended as they stomp their way through Brotzmann-like free jazz squeals & no-wave skronk, blues primitivism, neo-folk impressionism and Stooges-like avant rock. If they've contemporaries, i'd imagine some kinship with 75 Dollar Bill, but there's greater range to The Chinese Restaurants, like they've somehow managed to summon 23 years of free-form thinking and avant garde anti-asceticism into 30 mins of un-rarefied absurdity. It's a hell of a trip. And for what it's worth, another modern classic recorded in Connecticut, and more evidence that there's surely something in the water (or the woods) that way.. 200 copies, we've just a handful (and one of them is mine)