In an age lousy with collaboration-- more often than not punched in digitally or else transferred to and fro via Dropbox files-- a good old-fashioned "blow date" (to use jazz parlance) between two artists in the same room feels downright quaint. And yet when an email arrived in my inbox requesting review consideration for this EP recorded by Gala Drop and Ben Chasny, recorded live over the course of a week in 2011, there was reason to pause. Surely it was a typo: there seemed to be little shared ground between Lisbon, Portugal's instrumental group Gala Drop and NorCal's Six Organs of Admittance sole proprietor Ben Chasny.
For those who did not have the chance to see Gala Drop in their lone stateside appearance opening for Panda Bear on Governor's Island a few years back, they don't easily slot into musical categories. At times, I thought the band reminded me of Hot Chip, were they obsessed with spaced-out instrumentals like Pink Floyd's "Interstellar Overdrive", or else Liquid Liquid cutting their propulsive grooves with the laconic dubs of Augustus Pablo. Philip Sherburne, in reviewing their 2010 EP on Golf Channel, laundry-listed acts like El Guincho, John Talabot, Four Tet, Tortoise, Animal Collective, the Durutti Column, and King Tubby, all of which might make more sense as collaborators than Chasny with his glowering folk noise.
Not that Chasny is a lone wolf. For years, he added white phosphorescence to Comets on Fire, participated with ex-Deerhoofer Rob Fisk in Badgerlore, and last year saw him release an album with girlfriend Elisa Ambrogio as 200 Years. (I even recall seeing Chasny adding atmospherics behind Will Oldham as he read passages from Rudolph Wurlitzer's Slow Fade in a Brooklyn bookstore.)
And yet he still seemed well outside the realm of Portuguese-flavored nü-Balaerica, at least until the appearance of Broda. According to Gala Drop synth player (and prominent Lisbon concert promoter) Nelson Gomes, Chasny was a fan of the band's self-released first album, suggesting the band open dates on Six Organs' European tour in 2009, and then even suggesting the collaboration. Perhaps it's a way for Chasny to step outside of the strictures of Six Organs. Or maybe he missed the shredding salad days of Comets on Fire, who have been on hiatus since 2008. Perhaps he simply pined for a more rhythmic underpinning in which to juxtapose his guitar-slinging. The nearly 13-minute "Positano" builds from an echoing drum machine and Chasny's legato lead for three minutes before the drums of Afonso Simões and congas of Jerry the Cat enter. And at the halfway point of this atmospheric yet charged jam, Chasny's wah-wah quickens and it all turns as hot, viscous, and pleasantly disorienting as the Joshua Light Show, before wrapping after a particularly wheezing and flatulent synth turn from Gomes.
Namechecking the lightshow at Bill Graham's old Fillmore naturally suggests that late 1960s heyday of rock. (Think iFillmore East Meets West. Or better yet, North Cali Meeting Southern Europe.) So if the congas, wurlitzering organ, and guitar spurt of the title track rumba as convincingly as Santana, it's the Santana of Woodstock to keep in your now acid-touched mind, well before he conceived the Mars Volta and "Smooth". Chasny's bravura solo five minutes in, veering into searing noise and back amid the polyrhythms remains a particular highlight, making me miss his unfettered leads amid the din of prime-era Comets all the more.
Closer "Brain" might be the most overtly psychedelic of the three, suggesting that the grouping was just reaching symbiosis. Overall, this near half-hour of jams never separate into distinct acts, or suggest one artist dictating the others' moves. Gala Drop and Ben Chasny are neither entity, instead just a crack 1960's instrumental band wailing freely.
