JAMESZOO - Music For 17 Musicians

Like some of the label's brightest genre-blenders – from Iglooghost to Hiatus Kaiyote, from Jaga Jazzist to Louis Cole, from Thundercat to Hakushi Hasegawa – Van Dinther too has an approach that's hard to pin down, able to set off, with the dazzling brightness of fireworks, nu jazz, wonky textures, and ambitions of total music.

Take "Egg Modern", which is the opening track on the new album (it was the fifth on "Blind" – the recombinant approach has affected the tracklist too). From the first, pounding staccato notes, it's the winds that take over: bassoon, clarinet, flute. The floating character of the music, which establishes itself immediately and runs as a thread through the whole record, carries a clear minimalist echo. The nod to the elegance of Steve Reich, obvious from the title of the project itself, is in this reworking far more evident than in the original versions, which had a much rawer, more homespun feel. Sharp synths are replaced by orchestral back-and-forths; in place of the more penetrating electronic intrusions, here we find orderly exchanges – no less jarring for that – between different percussion instruments.

"Minimalism", however, risks being a misleading label. The overflowing lushness of the sound, evident in the swirling opening of "Music For Bat Caves" as much as in the zigzagging layers of "Bugatti", is in fact more in line with the more post- and contemporary drift of the genre, that kaleidoscopic totalism which, in various forms, has characterized the effervescent "Central Market" by Tyondai Braxton, the trajectories of Britain's Ex-Easter Island Head and Japan's Goat, or, on a more electronic front, the midi music of D'Eon and the epic collage inventions of Giant Claw and Mc Maguire. An overflowing response to the bite of horror vacui, one in which the rabbit pulled from the hat can be whatever it pleases, juxtaposing everything with its opposite in full maximalist spirit.

In the hypersaturated jungle of "Bugatti" and "Imps", of course, not all colors carry the same weight. Amid this multitude of centrifugal thrusts, what imprints a direction are the nu jazz/wonky synergies built — beyond Van Dinther himself — by the dazzling cast that rounds out Asko|Schönberg: the king of broken beat drumming Richard Spaven, keyboardist Niels Broos (already a collaborator of The Alchemist, Daedelus, and with Jameszoo on the Rolrolrol project), bassist Petter Eldh and saxophonist Otis Sandsjö (the latter two leading figures of the wonky/jazz scene, both also involved in Anton Eger's pivotal "Æ").

The album is, in short, mostly a gem of mutant hyperfusion, where behind the beat looseness coexists with enveloping third stream textures and sudden free peaks, and every beguiling chamber-music flourish could at any moment be upended by pinpoint flaschore explosions. Where the classicizing drive prevails, though, as in "Philip", in the tail end of "Big Game", or in the closing "Song", the record transcends its own ruffled elegance, revealing refined, courtly manners that seem to want to welcome back any listener who's lost the thread. Because yes, amid so much — albeit calibrated — chaos, it's easy to lose your way. Fortunately, though, "Music For 17 Musicians" never lets you lose contact: it lets you wander but keeps the course steady, with confidence, without always having to hold your hand.