I can think of exactly two reasons why Turing Machine might have chosen the name they did. The first is more probable (Occam's Razor and all that): They liked how it sounded. The second is unlikely, but too ingenious to ignore. Consider this scenario: Turing Machine read music criticism and glean that the field is crowded with pedants. They realize that the name "Turing Machine" might distinguish them from the math-rock pack and sway reviews in their favor. Sure enough, bylined sophists hit the Internet for descriptions of the machine, catching wind of a brainy metaphor for Turing Machine's music that will also justify the most self-gratifying, highfalutin prose. They expound upon its qualities as if they've been intimately familiar with them since birth, so nonchalantly that you might even think they're building one in their garage.
The sneaky part is that after you've spent a couple paragraphs linking a band's music to an arcane invention, particularly one whose inventor is synonymous with genius, it's almost impossible to speak poorly of them. It wouldn't serve the concept. I doubt Turing Machine had any of this in mind, but you never know...
Lucky for you, Reader, I don't know much of anything about Turing machines. I do understand that they're more like algorithms-- abstract computational devices-- than actual machines, and they certainly couldn't be constructed in a garage or any other physical location. Happily, my ignorance saves us all from having to slog through a lot of hubris about drums as tape cells and guitars as read-write heads or whatever.
The cumbersome analogy would be doubly unnecessary given that Zwei-- unlike Turing Machine's colder and mathier debut, A New Machine for Living-- patly describes itself. It retains Turing Machine's technical acumen while funneling it into more bodily pleasures. Math rock finds purchase in the analytical mind, which admires it from a clinical remove, but the primal throb of Zwei occurs in the nerve endings, in the skin.
After the demise of their math-rock band Pitchblende, Justin Chearno and Scott DeSimon teamed with Vineland drummer Gerard Fuchs to form Turing Machine. Chearno also plays in the incendiary party-punk act Panthers, but barring the occasional choppy bass line, Turing Machine has more in common with Pitchblende's unhinged skronk. At least their first album did. The superior Zwei relies more upon the narcotic repetition and swirling psychedelia of Krautrock icons like Can than elaborate meters.
Like Turing Machine's debut, Zwei is a seven-track full-length that primarily features tracks ranging from mid-sized epics to full-blown 13-minute opuses. There are no vocals, which might be a deal-breaker for those of you who swore off instrumental indie-prog after Don Cab called it quits. It was all the rage in the '90s, but as musicians realized that complexity can substitue for good songwriting, the genre became at once clogged and diluted. Zwei, by insinuating a steady pulse into its musical gymnastics, seems to slightly rejuvenate it.
"Bleach It Black" features the galloping drums and tight post-punk bass preferred by Panthers, with long, gleaming sheets of tremulously melodic, late Les Savy Fav-ish guitar leads, and dense volleys of overdriven chords. The whorls of bass and guitar on "Bitte, Baby, Bitte" are articulations of melodic friction, creating a rippling, lustrous surface that shifts between serrated topography and plateaued reverberation. And the rigid new wave stomp of "Don't Mind If I Don't" is tempered by staccato chords and questing soloing (so Seth Jabour, down to the guitar-as-synth tone and sprint / glide structure); like most of the record, its relentless linearity evokes rapid motion through bright and colorful spaces.
Every town has at least one band-- often including a few bookish fellows and one fat, sweaty dude-- whose sets seem more like gear expos than performances, the indie equivalents to guys who ride around town playing bass-test sequences on their customized stereo systems. No wonder the genre gets a bad rap. But enjoying Zwei requires no specialized knowledge of chromatic chords or alternate tunings. It's a prolonged melodic roar that mystifies without obscuring-- a clean, lambent line of power and nuance.
