When it comes to techno's outer limits, there are dabblers, there are explorers, and then there's Hieroglyphic Being. Few have ventured further out than Jamal Moss, a Chicago producer and DJ who also records as the Sun God, I.B.M. (Insane Black Man), and under various permutations of his main alias, like Hieroglyphic Being and the Configurative or Modular Me Trio. Moss' roots lie in drum machines and synths and four-to-the-floor rhythms, but he's equally interested in Sun Ra's Afrofuturist flights of fancy, and his music has been getting more and more free-form in recent years. On We Are Not the First, a top-notch group of collaborators—the J.I.T.U. Ahn-Sahm-Bul (or the Journey Into The Unexpected Ensemble; Moss loves his wordplay)—help him travel to some truly outerstellar reaches.
Moss and his ensemble recorded the album during a week of sessions in New York, and while the lineup shifts slightly throughout, it consists mainly of Arkestra bandleader Marshall Allen on saxophone and keys; Elliott Levin, a longtime member of Cecil Taylor's ensembles, on flute and saxophone; and Shahzad Ismaily, a member of Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog, on guitar. Ben Vida pitches in with modular synths on a few tracks, and Shelley Hirsch and Rafael Sanchez both contribute vocals—swooping, birdlike incantations and spoken-word, respectively. And then there's Greg Fox, the lightning-handed drummer for Liturgy, Zs, and Guardian Alien, who plays on eight of the album's 11 tracks, and whose contributions are the first indicator that we've left the limits of dance music far behind.
A few tracks still feature Moss' trademark drum-machine chug. "Cybernetics Is an Old Science", strafed by echo-soaked clatter, sounds a lot like the kind of techno that Moss has been producing for the past two decades, just slathered in a three-way duel of squealing saxophones and modular synth. On "Fuck the Ghetto / Think About Outer Space", Moss' loping toms and hi-hats provide the frame for Sanchez' exhortation to choose space over subjection, to think one's way out of the "ghetto of the mind." "Pussy Thumper" rides atop hypnotic, hi-hat-heavy programming that flits between an andante 100 BPM and a dizzying double-time tempo, depending on how you hear it. And on the strutting "Cimitière des Innocents", Fox restricts himself to filling in the space around Moss' programming while synth and reeds run circles around each other.
Elsewhere, though, Fox's liquid timekeeping sets the pace, and that's where the album really takes off. The title track is an 18-minute jam featuring Carter (flute, saxophone, trumpet), Ismaily (guitar), Vida (modular synth), and Fox along with Moss' synths and electronic drums. It is a pulsing, clanging din of chirp and squeal; it feels like eavesdropping upon a dozen conversations at once. The rhythm holds it together; it's chaotic, but it's also meditative, in the same way that being alone in a crowd can be meditative. For all its length, it doesn't really go anywhere; you just drop in and drift along, buoyed by its steady turbulence. We Are Not the First is an album deeply invested in the idea of evolution—of apes becoming upright and then heading offworld. But in its relationship to dance music as it's conventionally understood, the album is less an evolutionary step than a quantum leap into the unknown.
