Loop Herders Anteloper Grab Jazz By The Horns At 4th Stream

The Bozar venue in Brussels (derived from its formal name, Palais des Beaux-Arts) is a major arts centre that embraces sounds stretching from old school classical to modern electronica, with multiple performance spaces ranging from its acoustically esteemed concert hall down to a deep dancing basement den. It was mostly in the latter that the 4th Stream festival took place. The second edition of this three-dayer revelled in jazz that embraces other styles, particularly from the electronic realms. Bozar’s jazz programme is significant, and has ample room for more wayward manifestations of the music.

On its final evening, 4th Stream’s stand-out set actually happened upstairs in Bozar’s Studio Theatre, a seated venue that was probably more suited to the alternative slow-drone electronics of the NYC-based Anteloper. Jaimie Branch still blows plenty of trumpet solos in this duo setting with drummer Jason Nazary, but for much of the time she’s leaning over her table full of electronic gear. Using keyboard and effects, she has a particular predilection for setting-up ongoing loops of trumpet or vocal matter, then continuing to play live over this ever-shifting foundation of scuffed tones. Nazary adopts a similar attitude, with a rack of gadgets to the side of his kit, and an extra foot-pedal that directly triggers distorto-bass sounds from his laptop.

He reincarnated hip-hop patterns as free jazz, delivering a big boom bottom for Branch’s silvery slivers. She’s surely influenced by retro John Carpenter keyboard textures, mixing her percussively high plinks with a dubby drum resonance, as tiny marching snicks built up into a dense polyrhythmic crush. Branch began to take us on a Gothic circus ride, with bonus Pink Floyd oscillations, as she sampled on the hoof, real time becoming repeat-time. Nazary added heavily echoed mbira thumb piano, then graduated to furious drum patterns. As Branch spat percussive clicks and Nazary delved into his wired-up mangle, it sometimes got harder to untangle their contributions, as the sonics thickened and the beats intensified. Branch topped the set with a crackly-bite key-loop, and one of her best horn solos arcing over its rim.

Before and after the Anteloper set, a pair of Belgian outfits played down in the standing basement. They both suffered by comparison, as the Americans favoured a dirty, makeshift, semi-improvised wall-of-ill-behaved head-throb, whereas the Belgian combos both arrived heavily in thrall to the Los Angeles retro-electronica of its mega-export Brainfeeder label. This made them sound, by comparison, overly tech-headed, muso-orientated and needlessly clever. The opening Dutch/Belgian group of Lander Gyselinck (drums), Dries Laheye (bass) and Niels Broos (keyboards) had the latter player selecting some questionable settings, following the fashion for rebirthing uncool electro sounds as the rehabilitated acceptable face of modern fusion, in a gratuitous show of highly complex avant cabaret twitchery.

Then, following Anteloper, AAN/EOP featured Andrew Claes on ewi (electronic wind instrument), a device that should quite sensibly set up a warning alarm, as few players aside from Marshall Allen ever sound remotely convincing on this ‘horn’. Actually, Claes did invest some of the numbers with a more abstract electronic palette, but when the drums, bass and guitar locked into further twitch-to-impress routines, he ended up sounding like the majority of his forebears on the ewi. And then Claes brought out his flute. Without having Anteloper stuck in the middle, your scribe might have responded more enthusiastically to these acts, but as the contrasting setting stood, they came across as cerebral jazz funk throwbacks, even if manifested in the modern manner.