♫♪  Fuck Lungs - Honeysuckle

No reason not to love the sax/drums duos — the skronk > the rawk, am I right? I may not be, I wasn’t a great math student, but Fuck Lungs, the duo of Curt Oren (sax) and Joe Hess (drums), puts all computation to the test with Honeysuckle on Already Dead.

Less a blast through free jazz than a recontextualization of it, Honeysuckle still finds Oren and Hess riffing off each other at a breakneck pace. But instead of generating intense awe through sheer chops, they build some sort of fractalized microspore castle out their recordings, manipulating tape like Boredoms or Neu!, slathering on effects until the basic musical building blocks are rendered unrecognizable. This sets the mood in places, allowing the players to breathe, to explore the space, to stretch out and inhabit the weird corners of jazz that you may not often think of peering into.

Well, they do some face-melting stuff too.

The tension they generate as their instruments intertwine, grapple, and stretch to release ebbs and flows naturally, like an organic life cycle. If Oren’s the bee, then Hess is the flower, then vice versa, then altogether, then it’s all confused and the audience has been pollenated somehow. It’s less gross than you imagine but probably more gross than if it hadn’t happened at all — in the end, you’re still breathing in some of that shit.

Fucking Fuck Lungs fucking with our fucking lungs — that just writes itself.

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.

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