On the first volume of The Exchange Sessions, released earlier this year, the roles were assigned with several restrictions. Four Tet's Kieran Hebden would play the loony laptop upstart with a surfeit of good experiments and a deficit of good sense. A groove-crunching Steve Reid acted as the grizzled jazz sage, cautiously restraining his compatriot's erratic computations. Neither musician seemed willing to alter (or revel in) these positions; the ensuing album suggested the artists might as well have telecommuted to the performance. Despite moments of fusion, the album generally exhibited a gross incompatibility between Reid's structured drumming and Hebden's haphazard attempts at international rhythms.
On Vol. 2, which was recorded at the same London session, not a whole lot has changed. Yet I appreciate the album more than its predecessor. Hebden and Reid must know that boredom inevitably leads to fascination. It's the Law of Double Albums: One dull record is simply dull, two dull records means the audience must've missed something. Still, there are some material differences between the two volumes, though they're nearly invisible without systematic side-by-side comparison. First, Vol. 2 is faster and more reluctant to wallow in eye-shutting ambience. The first volume had a tendency to revert to flaccid schmaltz in the middle of interminable 20-minute jams. No such difficulties plague the new disc. (If anything, the songs are too busy.)
The album's centerpiece, "Hold Down the Rhythms, Hold Down the Machines", is Hebden's most successful attempt to convert Reid's visceral energy into a digital meltdown: A flurry of condensational reverb and acidic cymbals. Reid's disco hi-hat and military rhythms seamlessly roll around Hebden's machine-gun klezmer and wobbly pitch-bend wheels. The whole track is riddled with cut-up hip-hop rasps, coughed-up spittle, and a sense of anxiety. In short, the symptoms of pulmonary congestion. Whatever the value, it's hardly monotonous. For a collaboration that's been fairly minimalist thus far, the song brims with exotic influences.
Ignoring that notable exception, there's a general sense of unintended consequences throughout the recording. "Noémie" approaches interesting ambient ideas but then degenerates into a series of self-parodic references to Australasian percussion: low drones, perfunctory arrangements of scratches and plinks, wooden Polynesian birdcalls, and buoy splashes. The whole thing's a bit too Jungle Cruise to generate any genuine enthusiasm. There are some fascinating elements-- the tinkering tape works and morse code create strange connections between malarial heat and colonial technology-- but it's frustrating to watch these fragments fail to integrate fully into the rest of the piece. The dullest passages absorb entire album sides, while the best ones are unnecessarily short. Why relegate your most interesting thoughts to split-second moments within half-hour pieces? Moreover, it's hard to appreciate those aspects without listening to the (often tedious) context. These are talented musicians-- and Vol. 2 is superior to the first disc-- but that development hardly merits owning two full albums of indifferent collaboration. If you have to choose, pick Vol. 2. If you don't, choose Reid's Spirit Walk.
