Music / Jazz
Review: Michelson Morley, Bebop Club
Given Jake McMurchie’s ongoing obsession with obscure science and cosmology it’s somehow appropriate that, like a wandering comet, his futuristic Michelson Morley project appears every couple of years, shines for a brief period and then sadly drifts off to obscurity. Their re-appearance at the Bebop was therefore unsurprisingly packed out before they began and, happily, more than satisfied everybody’s high expectations.
Dan Messore, Will Harris and Mark Whitlam in action
All four Michelson Morley players had electronics at their disposal – drummer Mark Whitlam using a crash pad and laptop, the others a variety of effects pedals – but the sounds they deployed made full use of their acoustic instruments as well. Indeed, it was the adroit interchange between electronic and acoustic that made the music so interesting, the players often spending minutes crouched over pedals while manipulating looping waves and endless pulsing after-effects before kicking them out to let Jake’s full-toned tenor sax or Will Harris’ resonant bass create a different space altogether.
Michelson Morley get down to business
Thus There Are No Perfect Waves (a tribute surely to guitarist Dan Messore’s passion for surfing) told a strong electronic story of tense waiting before a crashing roaring climactic surge threw the sound into a sub-aqua deadening that dissipated and sank to a close. Even more evocative, the romantically titled The Last Of Me Will Wait For What’s Left of You was splendidly avant-lounge music, loose-limbed in pace with clean and easy melody lines over sumptuous cymbal waves. Yet the very insistence of Jake’s rolling sax exposition gave an edgy intelligence to the tune, bolstered by the occasional interjection of drum flourishes and a growing undertow of electronic eeriness.
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Fancy footwork required – Jake McMurchie’s pedal array
Dan’s understated gift for apparently meandering guitar lines that produce mild surprises and gentle subversions was the core of All The Welcomes, the others motoring along in support with complementary rolling patterns. That new tune was a marked contrast to old favourite Ammageddon which gave drummer Mark the chance to revel in bombastic, fast stabbing runs and moments of pure thunder behind Jake’s crashing harmonised sax and a gripping bassline that evoked old proggers Amon Duul II or Can. It was interesting to realise how much Michelson Morley brought together contemporary digital music with older ‘electric’ influences. In many ways Jake’s complex pedal array was a return to the linked modules of the proto-synthesisers used before Dr Moog parcelled them all up into a single instrument.
That said, a high point was the elegant simplicity of End of Age, a straightforward duet between Will Harris’ Bach-like variations on bass and Jake’s sax. Starting from a pulsing monotone the reed voice slowly elaborated within the bass line until the two began evolving the tide of the music together. It was a definitively cool moment that settled into a perfectly judged subsidence. As a whole the set was a triumphant reminder of how richly intriguing this well-thought out project has become, based on the solid foundations of two excellent albums (Aether Drift and Strange Courage). Hopefully this cyclical reappearance will also mean a burst of new material and maybe a further recording to add to those?
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