The day Grubbs and Gustafsson spent recording this album must have been like watching kids at a fancy imports-only toy store, playing with high-concept Legos and fragile Scandinavian toys, their heads bowed over the colorful pieces as they studiously assemble warships and dream homes. There's so much concentration on this record, because the musicians don't stop to smile: the six improvised pieces are impressively inventive, yet distractedly serious.
This partnership started in the late nineties, when Chicagoan Grubbs met Gustafsson at a Gastr del Sol show. A high-power reedsman from Sweden's AALY Trio, Gustafsson runs with a pack of heavy European players who make regular trips to the Midwest's mecca; as opposed to his rigorously-trained partner, Grubbs is known for playing post-rock, avant-folk and other off-shoots of "rock." The two men recorded an album together in 1999, called Apertura; it was a spontaneous, enraptured hour-long session of slow droning music, and they went on to play gigs that proved haphazard dissections of both resumes. To quote their record label, the shows "wandered from song to free-jazz freakout to tunnel of drone to digital collage to mouthless saxophone and brainless, bruising guitar."
You can characterize Off-Road simply as an effort to capture all the facets of the duo's performances, from drawn-out to curious to explosive, every instrument at their disposal thoroughly studied and reinvented. The album starts with its only pure virtuoso moment, Gustafsson putting his tenor through a post-Ayler duck-raping workout. He doesn't so much play as experiment with instruments, using contact mikes to get a stethescope-like view inside his horns. The best example of this closeness is "Dystopian Turboprop", with its elephantine breaths followed by sampled clicking and fluttering-- the clacking of the keys?-- assembled into a sound that, going with the title, resembles a flapping balsa airplane powered by a rubber band.
Working on laptop in addition to guitar, Grubbs dominates the samples and processing. Even when they bring in turntablist Henry Moore Selder, he only adds moaning tonearm rumbles; his best work here may be the maracas he plays on "Pumpkin Creek", a simple, tuneful piece built around a folky guitar line. The noises, voices and found sounds that litter the rest of the album come to a head in "Back Off", a dryly humorous freak-out during which a meowing cat and an opera singer face off, as Grubbs and Gustafsson run it across downed power-lines, interjecting tinny drum machines and feedback samples. Still, most of the random sounds on Off-Road are balanced by structure, Grubbs often setting up moods or simple figures they can build on.
Off-Road is short, and other improvisers would probably spend three times as long covering the same ground; this probably represents "the best bits" of their work on that one day in the studio, and even though each piece is improvised, they're well defined and separated. On the other hand, without the development that led up to these discoveries, we're missing some important context; the tone falls somewhere between the rigorous studies of a Keith Rowe and the bring-your-flak-jacket playfulness of a Han Bennick. Stuck in the middle, it lacks mood; even as you dig through its nuances, you may appreciate it more than enjoy it, but fans of either performer could find it rewarding. Off-Road isn't a defining statement, but it's a great index to the encyclopedic sound-world of Grubbs and Gustafsson.
