David Torn – Prezens Label: ECM Records – ECM 1877, ECM Records – B0008650-02 Format: CD, Album Country: US Released: 2007 Genre: Jazz Style: Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation Tracklist 1 Ak 9:19 2 Rest & Unrest 3:44 3 Structural Functions Of Prezens 10:56 4 Bulbs 6:18 5 Them Buried Standing 2:43 6 Sink 7:14 7 Neck-Deep In The Harrow... 12:32 8 Ever More Other 4:12 9 Ring For Endless Travel 2:23 10 Miss Place, The Mist... 5:45 11 Transmit Regardless 7:20 Companies etc
Manufactured By – Decca Label Group Marketed By – Decca Label Group Recorded At – Club House Studios Mixed At – Cell Labs
Credits
Alto Saxophone – Tim Berne Design – Sascha Kleis Drums – Tom Rainey Drums [Additional Drums] – Matt Chamberlain (tracks: 10) Electric Piano [Fender Rhodes], Organ [Hammond B3], Mellotron, Electronics [Bent Circuits] – Craig Taborn Engineer [Assistant (Recording)] – Munkh-Orgil Turbold Engineer [Recording] – Hector Castillo Executive-Producer – Manfred Eicher Guitar [Guitars], Sampler [Live Sampling], Effects [Manipulation] – David Torn Mixed By – David Torn Photography By – Robert Lewis (10) Producer – David Torn
Notes Recorded March 2005 Clubhouse Studios, Rhinebeck, NY Mixed at Cell Labs, New York
David Torn is a musical chameleon, moving effortlessly from soundtrack work to pop projects to edgy improv, extending his guitar with electronic programming, sampling, and overdubs. Here he sets out at the helm of an improvising quartet with some regular partners from the New York Downtown School (saxophonist Tim Berne, keyboard player Craig Taborn, and drummer Tom Rainey) and then transforms the results with live sampling and extended studio tinkerings until the present set of pieces emerge in all their fractured and compound glory. Sounds morph suddenly into other sounds—-funk into heavy metal, guitar into radio wave, drum into bass--and time stretches and contracts. The extended band tracks are scenes of continuous transformation, like "Structural Functions of Prezens" in which the naked acoustic sweetness of Berne's alto is eventually joined by its spectral, sampled other, or the rapid chatter of Rainey's drums is set against a world sinking in time, with tones oozing lower and drifting into stasis. Always a master of compound textures, Torn here extends his guitar and the quartet into a utopian orchestra between the human and the machine. --Stuart Broomer