With Blue Ramen, Danny Zelonky returns to the moniker that made his name, and to the label whose profile he catapulted into the electronic major leagues. Approximate Love Boat, Zelonky's Low Res debut, remains a masterpiece of out-there jazz/noise/IDM: his take on jazz was both hipsterish (borrowing heavily from the space-age bachelor end of the jazz spectrum) and elitist (in its warped, misshapen moments). Blue Ramen, as befits an album whose title denotes exotic noodling, furthers Zelonky's exploration of alien jazz approximations. It's as unsettling as it is spirited-- the Martian equivalent of Les McCann's Layers.
"Shaftasia" opens the album with fuzzed-out keyboards and rumbling percussion. Looser than a telltale's mouth, the track meanders through awkward harmonies, Morton Subotnik-style electro-acoustic spaciness, and some Sly Stone funk. The Latin jam "Bailamami" treads on Señor Coconut's kitschy toes, but tempers humor with the old world pathos of the Buena Vista Social Club. "Blue Ramen #3" continues that melancholy with a teary, cinematic organ, serenading a lost love; "Blue Ramen #2" follows swiftly with a freak-beat, Fisher Price take on the same theme.
The bourbon-and-smoke blues of "Chalky" and "Dirty Serenade" are the sort of wee-hours laments you'd expect to find in a second-rate science-fiction film. But while their emulation of Rashied Ali's infinite percussion is engaging, both fail to evoke more than the bleeding colors of a badly developed b-movie. Now, certainly, b-movie soundtracks have their place in my cold heart. It's just that it's apparent that Zelonky doesn't understand the lightweight nature of the Max Rebo Band's mutant melodies: he's actually trying to sell us this stuff at face value. Things look up on "Veneer", as he imagines Eric Satie drifting through the cosmos, picking out chromatic commentaries on his interstellar sojourn. But the record ends a bit anti-climactically-- as if to prove he's capable of conventional performance, Zelonky closes Blue Ramen with the relatively pedestrian "Heliotropic 5", a gutsy, stomping tune that cloaks nonconformist viscera at its deeply buried core.
Blue Ramen exists, for me, as an alternative soundtrack to John Carpenter's longhaired, paranoiac deep-space comedy, Dark Star. Zelonky's imperfect, cloudy jazz perfectly mimics the stir-crazy atmosphere of the film: just as you think you've got your head in the same galaxy, he punches the coordinates for a far freakier sector of the universe. In a world of music designed by robots, the extraterrestrial Blue Ramen distinguishes itself in its approximate humanity.
