Power trio carves out an idiosyncratic niche amidst composition, directed improvisation, avant-rock and free jazz.

Led by the former guitarist of Montreal psych band The Besnard Lakes, Raegele's power trio (Miles Perkin, bass; Thom Gossage, drums) carves out an idiosyncratic niche amidst formal composition, directed improvisation, avant-rock and free jazz. The players draw from a wealth of experience in different styles (disco/RnB, indie rock, jazz, chamber music) and influences (Wayne Krantz, Ben Monder, Ralph Towner). They make genre-defying music that's fresh, surprising and engaging.

This group began playing together in 2005 as the core of Thom Gossage's Other Voices band (In Other Words, Songlines, 2011), in which the three players developed a language that incorporates gesture, rhythmic opposition, and abstract melodicism as well as a dedication to creating music that is at once composed and spontaneous, considered and visceral, stripped-down and opulent. Says Steve, 'I'm trying to create different reference points for me and my musicians in order to imply structure, and elicit creative improvising. I'm interested in creating boundaries for the players and seeing how they subvert them and twist them to their particular abilities.'

Says Toronto guitarist Justin Haynes: 'It is beautiful and soulful music but it is not warm. Nor is it lyrical. Nor does it overtly groove much. It's paranoid and hopeful at the same time, like Steve. And like Sisyphus (the title of another one of Steve's tunes), Steve has his own rock to push. Steve's rock is jazz. The music on this disc, it seems to me, exists chiefly to facilitate a kind of terse, textural, and conceptual improvising very unique to this trio...The music is complex and layered and unsettling and sometimes caustic and mean and almost totally homoerotic. The swells, static, vibrations, trash talk, code and other dirty details sifting through this record are its gold.'

Track Listing

• Last Century
• (Sisyphus)
• Janet Jackson
• Stop Short
• (Daedalus)
• The Opposite
• (Hercules)
• Verdun
• Fight Club the Rabbit
• Pareidolia
• (Bacchus)

Additional Details

Label: Songlines

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 50 mins

Release Date: 02/09/10

UPC: 774355158227