Poly-saxophonist (he’s up to four now) Dave Rempis and electric guitarist Tashi Dorji are hardly strangers. With their trio Kuzu (third member: drummer Tyler Damon), they made five albums and crisscrossed the country, touring like those get-in-the-van times were still with us. It’s easy to hear Kuzu’s unbridled intensity and spontaneous fearlessness in the music that the duo makes. After all, Dorji’s never abandoned his hardcore inspirations when he pivoted toward freer music, and Rempis is as adept at mustering massive blocks of tone from his lower horns as he is at applying stone-cutting force with the higher ones.
But it’s also gratifying to hear them take this new configuration into zones where the trio did not tread. With three loud players figuring out the forms in real time, Kuzu projected a massive wall of sound and only occasionally opened windows of relative restraint that invited a listener into its interior. While Dorji and Rempis play as hard and fast as ever, the absence of drums opens up a lot of space for them to maneuver. Sometimes, one player frames the other, as on the closing “Zilch,” where Rempis’ baritone twists wrought-iron figures, simultaneously rough and airy, in the area between Dorji’s klaxon-like loops and some spare, bent harmonics. There’s also room for involving solo passages, as on the introduction to “Orphic Hymn,” during which the guitarist patiently doles out phrases steeped in blues feeling without resorting to blues forms.
Both musicians draw on the far reaches of their respective techniques, but they use these sounds for expressive effect, not novelty. Gnash delivers plenty of the badassery you would expect from a record with such a name, but it also provides superb examples of the trusting give-and-take necessary for musicians to co-create night after night. [Aerophonic]
—Bill Meyer
