(idm) revue: Spacetime Continuum's new one

From Tom Millar
Sent Fri, Jun 4th 1999, 08:59

Spacetime Continuum = Double Fine Zone

Erk! Jonah Sharp's gone smooth jazz! Well, not entirely.
Perhaps I should have guessed this was going to be the predominant
direction of the new album after hearing some of his recent output as
Freeform Attractor. Lush, layered ambient-matic chords are still there,
as are the step-time spazzo rhythms. Jonah's watermark is on every
track, for sure, but a lot of times I feel he's not living up to emit
ecaps; several songs are nicely layered up to a point but sacrifice a
trad. synth lead for bubbly live blues solos courtesy of Jonah's sax and
harmonica jazzbo friends. Once or twice I felt like I was listening to
the audio track for the Weather Channel, albeit with better beats underneath.

It's a nice album to be sure- my expectations are probably a little high
as a result of emit ecaps and the remix album that followed- he's just
not doing what he does best, per se. My perception of emit ecaps' sound,
relative to a lot of detroit-styled techno jazz, was that it was just
_thicker_, more cohesively constructed than the average I-wanna-be-Mad
Mike/Juan Atkins tracks some others (including mad mike & juan atkins,
who do occasionally exhibit a nasty habit of imitating themselves
sometimes) were putting out concurrently.

The jazz solos are good but not strong enough to fill the void that
Jonah's left for them. On the harmonica tracks, it sounds like he just
opened up a swath in the composition and dropped a live musician in it-
no direction to go, not even a solo "section" being used as part of the
song, just "plop" and there's harmonica man deedling around in melody
territory. Sonically, it still comes together, the arrangement's tight
as per Jonah Sharp specifications, but the sax & harmonica don't add any
beef to the tracks, more like textural flutter.

The thick chord-memory jams and the crack drum n' bleep programming is
where it's at. It just needs to stay there, boil a little longer, get
thicker and thicker until we can really have the techno jazz warhead
promised long ago by the remit recaps experiments.
Crazy-live-funky-fresh real jazz musicians playing regular old reedy
toot toot blues... I don't know that it fits. But track 5, beveled edge,
kicks ass. Ignore the first line of this review and just go get a copy
for yourself.