Burnt Friedman has a rep for flirting with the funk. Early on, his approach and his output-- intricately polyrhythmic, meticulously crafted "hypermodern jazz" tracks full of shimmering vibraphones and cheeky Latin percussion-- often found him branded as an ironist. But his productions, whether solo, with Atom Heart (as the duo Flanger), or alongside a growing cast of collaborators-- like Root 70 saxophonist Hayden Chisholm, improvising/experimental guitarist Joseph Suchy, vocalist Theo Altenberg and, perhaps most importantly, Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit-- have never been reducible to kitsch. Listen to Burnt Friedman & The Nu Dub Players' 2003 album Can't Cool: for all the obvious digital traces (oddly truncated hi-hats, drum patterns physically impossible for a single percussionist to play) there are no winks or nudges. To say that "Fuck Back", the record's lead cut, is a postmodern take on Afrobeat is hardly to deny its ferocity: no matter how many steps removed from the source, urgency remains coded in the music's DNA.
Indeed, it's in the collaborative work that Friedman has really dug into the groove, particularly on his two records with Liebezeit: both volumes of Secret Rhythms offer an approach to polyrhythm rarely heard in electronic music. By slowing everything down, the two amplify the wiggle room, leaving more space for drum hits to bounce beyond the strictures of quantization, allowing for rhythms that restore liquidity to the idea of pulse.
After 2006's sublime Heaps Dub-- in which the jazz quartet Root 70 performed acoustic versions of Friedman and Flanger classics that Friedman, in turn, remixed into 10 tracks of exactly five minutes apiece, a sort of dub of a dub of a dub-- Friedman, aided by an expanded cast of characters, returns with a far more conventional album. Formally, it's probably the most conventional of his career: these aren't krautrock jams or ambient dub meditations or electro-cumbia dustups, they're proper songs fronted by a rotating crew of vocalists. Longtime Friedman collaborator Theo Altenberg lends a Tom Waits-like croak to three songs; Hamburg soul singer Daniel Dodd-Ellis, Berlin's Barbara Panther, Funkstörung collaborator Enik and UK broken-beat veteran Steve Spacek all guest on two apiece. All of them dusky, throaty singers, they give First Night an unmistakably late-night vibe.
The closest reference point might be to the acoustic-guitars-and-edits approach to soul practiced by His Name Is Alive on 2001's Someday My Blues Will Cover the Earth, which might not be as surprising as it first seems: Friedman actually covered "Someday" on Can't Cool, and he also remixed H.N.I.A.'s "Nothing Special" for a set of Someday-derived singles.
Timbre and voicing play a central role, because these songs hardly live and die by their chord changes: propelled by scraggly guitar figures and dub's ruminative bass lines, they remain classically minimalist in spirit, splitting the difference between Steve Reich and Roy Ayers' RAMP (or Philip Glass and Tony Allen). What makes even the most static of the songs so engaging is the way they seem to shimmer in place, as diverse lines of winds, strings, guitar, accordion, synthesizers and effects weave porous webs. It's somewhat shocking that only two tracks are credited to a session drummer, Root 70's Jochen Rückert-- the majority of the record's rhythms are presumably Friedman's own programmed creations. If true, it's one hell of a percussive coup; for all their understatement, these are among the most sophisticated beats Friedman's ever come up with. Like virtually everything on the album, they never call attention to their own virtuosity.
The whole record, in fact, has been put together so subtly that at first it may fail to stick. For a long time, I thought of First Night Forever as a nice, relaxing mood piece, and bided my time for a new Friedman/Liebezeit collaboration. But somehow I kept coming back to the album; where most records on my review-assignments list find their way back to the shelves, this one crept into regular rotation in those rare slots I listen to music for pleasure: morning coffee, cooking dinner, the bedtime wind-down. Such domestically functionalist music often gets the short end of the critical stick; 30 years after Music for Airports, we still have an innate distrust of music as wallpaper. First Night Forever's trick is that it functions on two levels at once: behind that calming, rippling, jazzy veneer there are strange forces at work, peeling back the wallpaper to reveal a passageway to points unknown.
