Guvenc/McLennan - terrible rooms

 

Released: March 15

The latest combined effort from multi-instrumentalists Matt Robert McLennan and Deniz Guvenc is supremely chilled out improvised jazz album that is heavy on ambient atmosphere while maintaining a loose feel with plenty of flourish. It’s not particularly smooth, even with its washed out vibe it still has a little bit of edge to it, particularly in the guitar tones. Our opening track, “kapiti plain, bleachrace,” has the closest thing to a hook wee hear as a guitar softly strums out a gentle rhythm in a thin and atmospheric tone. It blends quite well with the surrounding ambience as soft synths and and accompanying guitar imprinted gently in the background. 

We get into some of the noisier stuff here as well with “trash anchored, silver poisoning.” It’s nothing that gets really aggressive but casts a few dark shadows over the otherwise liked a loose album. IT opens up with a soft wall of distortion and dives headlong into long bits of feedback and distorted drones, giving a slightly reminiscent vibe of Sunn-O if they were to lighten up a bit. By the end of the track, those heavy bits of distortion and being have coalesced into a single deep overtone that oscillates every so slowly as gentle recurrences of heavy distortion pop in and out. These dark tones reappear slightly in “childhood whale movies within childhood whale movies” but this one keep with the soft plucks and strums for the most part. 

Terrible rooms lives in a fun and weird spot between jazz and ambient, with the intricate soloing and improvising taking a front spot on top of the soft synths and the unusual room atmosphere the album is bathed in. Sometimes it sounds like it may have been recorded in a doctor’s waiting room and other times it sounds like it could be a smoky pool hall somewhere. It manages to tiptoe on the line between sounding out of place and sounding right on the spot. It’s a mostly slow moving affair with lots of fun toying around. Slightly noisy, mostly relaxed, and entirely fun to listen to in a sit down and study kind of way.