NNCK & EMBRYO presents: EMBRYONNCK
...desperate measures lifting thickest fog...gold dust
sprinkled in mountains of tar...recourse to art-repository to
reconnect...the leering horror-monkey may loosen his grip for a
moment, and flight is attained yet again until landing...from
current remove, it is strange to look back to days in gotham's
grime-canyons, when the hunt for art through medium of old LPs
was consuming passion (ok, is) ? and amid unfathomed 12" wells
uncovered, the group Embryo's output plumbs deep, a rich source
of ongoing surprise... as it happened, among those hunting (and
weirdly manifesting), were members of collective NNCK...during
this time, all concerned did best to stay afloat on swirling
pools of music...so, at one salient point in deepest-night
session, an obscure alley was espied through a momentary rift
in a very dense beard...and it slipped thru the breach that
the heaviest bands, outfits who traveled thru goodly time-
spans, eventually arrived where sounds came through and
formalities were dissolved in the outpouring... the
possibilities were endless at the impasse.. and misery was the
meat of sweet fleeting happiness...
so, during one hunting-trip to the hinterlands, a bewildering
beast was netted: a vinyl LP by aggregation "Embryo",
stridently proclaiming itself as the "Apo Calypso"...and as
intimated by the bright cover-photo of a moment in some beyond
-the-pale festivity, the music was strangely moving, and moving
strangely...riffs and grooves begin, vibes suggesting jazz,
funk achieved with ease, ragas melting into mutating
forms...and the mind wanders? shapes shift and spaces open up
and glossolalia is the sense of nonsense, opening a winding
path to the present-and-beyond.
through decades of shifting membership Embryo has evolved,
sinking long unruly roots into jazz...psychedelic-
rock...african, asian and middle-eastern musics...lord-only-
knows-what-else...and even-what-lord-doesn't-know; which
brings us NNCK, urban-hermetic unit of some years' standing,
whose primal sounds evade definition, speaking an unpredictable
language-of-the-moment exiled from established lexicons; and to
this document-in-hand, capturing the actual meeting of
explorers exploring together, at generous length and breadth
and depth and ... coming around - conflation of two flocks,
evidenced herein, is apt fruition.
No Neck Blues Band and Embryo
EmbryoNNCK
[Staubgold; 2006]
Rating: 7.5
At first glance this improvisational summit meeting between No Neck Blues Band and Embryo seems a curious and unlikely match, but the same could probably be said for any collaboration involving either of these two iconoclastic outfits. NNCK are one of NYC's most shadowy and studiously enigmatic free-sound collectives, while the Munich-based Embryo is a long-running Krautrock group whose music is a stylish blend of jazz, space rock, and pan-ethnic rhythms. Founded by percussionist Christian Burchard after he left Amon Duul II in 1969, Embryo have released more than 20 albums in various incarnations over their 35-year existence.
Burchard has remained the only consistent member of Embryo, a fact that might help explain the erratic nature of their extended discography. Early in their career, on such albums as 1973's semi-classic We Keep On, Embryo's music showed the distinct influence of Bitches Brew-style electric fusion, while later records show the group to be progressively informed by Indian, Middle Eastern and North African sources. Much of their work, however, has been too straitlaced and overtly jazzy to peg them as an obvious forerunner to NNCK's primal, shamanic guerilla performances.
Yet despite their radical differences in strategy and approach, these two ensembles share more in common than it might initially appear. Both groups diligently shun categorization, drawing upon whatever stray traces of free jazz, psychedelia, ethnic folk, or Martian blues that happen to capture their fancy, while maintaining a decidedly liberal attitude towards possible instrumentation. Moreover, both units are clearly guided by the same dogged devotion to spontaneous invention, and it's this sheer undisguised enthusiasm for joint exploration that enables EmbryoNNCK to so accurately capture the dazzling midpoint between their two softly-colliding galaxies.
On the opening volley of "Weider des erste Mal" the album immediately satisfies the first requirement of such collaborations-- it sounds like all participants are thoroughly locked-in and enjoying themselves. As many as 13 musicians contribute to these seven tracks, and yet the collective sound is never inordinately fussy or impenetrable. Nor is it ever unduly chaotic, especially by NNCK standards. With so many individual players involved it becomes difficult to pinpoint who exactly is doing what, but most of these heavily-percussive tracks have a steady underpinning of marimba or xylophone that I mentally credit to Burchard. This sultry percussion helps infuse pieces like "Frank Cologne" with the same languid, fractured exotica that has coursed through No Neck's work since at least their 2003 album Ever Borneo! At points, as on the live-recorded "Five Grams of the Widow", the assembled rhythms can bring out some of NNCK's latent drum-circle tendencies, but the album's continual melodic updates and relatively short track lengths keep the performances from descending too far into repetitive tribal excess.
Another of the album's more distinctive voices belongs to NNCK vocalist/ performer Takahashi Michiko, whose spirited pipes supply tracks like "Wieder das erste Mal" and the slight-return of "Das erste Mal" with a hazy, generative propulsion reminiscent of recent Gang Gang Dance. The collaboration makes its most muscular avant-rock gestures on the bass-centered "Die Farbe as dem All", a loose-tongued megalith that would've sounded right at home on NNCK's 2005 Qvaris album. This song is also perhaps the best demonstration of EmbryoNNCK's casual symmetry. As with all the album's best moments, it proves the border between the two groups to be as porous and illusory as any drawn on the atlas, and gathers all their accumulated force seamlessly together into a single, indivisible whole.
-Matthew Murphy, April 19, 2006
Review by Thom Jurek
It goes and it goes. You may have an idea of what you think a full collaboration between New York's underground improv pioneers the No-Neck Blues Band (NNCK) and Germany's longstanding Krautrock experimentalists Embryo (alive in one form or another for over 30 years) might sound like. In some ways, you're right. But nothing quite prepares the listener for the understated, snaky, playful, yet ambiguous interaction that goes on here. Embryo have consistently defied categorization with their incorporation of various ethnic and aboriginal elements in their music. While it's true that Christian Burchard has been the only constant member, he has brought in players from Australia, various regions of Africa, Laplanders, and all manner of indigenous musicians to add to his mix of composition and improvisation. NNCK have been from the land of strange from the word go. Their numerous releases have defied easy pigeonholing and their insistence on remaining anonymous (until this release where every musician's name is listed on the back cover, but there's still no information about who plays what or where). This collaboration walked the wire from the outset and could have gone either way. It stays on the spare side of excess, though there is always a lot going on. Check the opener, "Wieder das Erste Mal," where a tom-tom, hand percussion, marimbas, shakers, a cimbalom, and a moaning voice usher in nine and a half minutes of trance where flutes and voices slip into the mix gradually, almost imperceptibly, until there is a wall of sound where the listener falls in the middle of the swirl. Its tribal nature never breaks down, but there is so much more in this mysterious meld that one can forget the rhythms, because they enter the unconscious. "Five Grams of the Widow," a brief piece recorded live, is almost jazz with arranged horns, vibes, toy pianos, etc., following a head for a short period. One has to wonder if the piece was excerpted for this release. It would have been nice if this one had stretched out more. "Die Farbe Aus Dem All," also moves into out rock territory and becomes an entity that engages jazz and Krautrock more than anything else here. The wailing horns are a real turn on, as is the intensity of the work. Both of the last two tunes here take a while to find their groove: "Zweiter Sommer" is laid-back and exotic, full of flutes and hammered dulcimers and subtly chanted voices; "Das Erste Mal," a revisit of the first track, is over 13 minutes and finds its groove about halfway through. Again, percussion and voices (with some throat singing) lead the charge, but it floats and begins to move and change shape, shifting constantly for about the last seven minutes until it ends up so far from where it began that one is likely to wonder what has just transpired. This is magic music; it melts, shifts, transforms itself as it displaces time. It goes and it goes.
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