♫♪  Tiger Hatchery with Paul Flaherty - “Morning Light”

Chicago-born trio Tiger Hatchery have been alchemizing noise shred strategies into free-jazz improv sessions and searing faces in both basement DIY zones and higher profile engagements alike for the better part of a decade now. I would say they’ve been doing so on an “on and off” basis, given that the band’s members have all lived in different quadrants of America for a while now, but it never really feels like Tiger Hatchery is “off.” Despite the distance, they manage to come together to record and to tour whenever possible — to the delight of heads across the land lucky enough to be located in their blast radius. Their discography, with releases ranging from classic cassette jammers on imprints like Baked Tapes and Deception Island to 2013’s banner LP Sun Worship on the mighty ESP Disk, invites revisiting whenever possible, if only to further excavate the wailing details of each live ritual.

On the upcoming Live in New Haven LP, due October 16 on Ergot Records, Tiger Hatchery join forces with saxophone sorcerer Paul Flaherty — a heavyweight of underground avant/free-jazz circuits, who has explored the fringes of improv in ensembles with the likes of Thurston Moore, C Spencer Yeh, Weasel Walter, and Oren Ambarchi. Flaherty’s playing astounds in its diversity, encompassing a palette of warp speed atonal trills, yelped cries, and occasional moments of somber melodicism that evoke Albert Ayler’s typically consonant and/or reappropriated head passages. On Live in New Haven, Flaherty locks into symbiosis with Tiger Hatchery saxophonist Mike Forbes, tracing a jagged pathway of legible melodic interplay that breaks off at a moment’s notice into freefall runs of conjoined squalling.

On LP opener “Morning Light,” premiering below, the quartet transfixes us for five overloaded minutes with a joyride through juxtaposed moods and tonalities. While Flaherty and Forbes build tension with a cycle of increasingly dissonant fanfare phrases, drummer Ben Billington and bassist Andrew Scott Young wring a range of alien scraping textures out of their instruments — before the whole crew locks into a busy upward trajectory punctuated with snare rolls and spastic cymbal abuse. By the time Young kicks on the distortion, which suddenly plants his chaotic bass bursts near the front of the live mix, the ensemble has crossed over into full-on skronk terror mode, and there’s no going back.

• Tiger Hatchery: http://tigerhatchery.com
• Ergot Records: http://ergotrecords.blogspot.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

Most Read



Etc.