Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble - Intergalactic Beings (2014)

Avant-garde jazz/classical suite inspired by Afrofuturist author Octavia Bulter. Nicole Mitchell has received high praise from the likes of the WIRE, Peter Margasak, & Howard Reich. The Black Ensemble includes JEFF PARKER (TORTOISE, CHICAGO UNDERGROUND DUO), JOSHUA ABRAMS, DAVID BOYKIN & TOMEKA REID. Recorded live at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art


The album is totally rife with inner conflict. Even when a melody declares itself with the assertion of full-bodied diaphragm projectiles from brass and woodwind together – like a thought rendered with the clarity of a physical sphere, like a snooker ball held in the hand – there are scuffling disturbances happening in and around: scrapes and dissonances of doubt, timpani rumbles of gut-born unease. Moves manifest and then instantly retracted, as the mercurial gush of improvisatory thought twists a right idea into one that feels utterly wrong; the record is a perplexity cyclone contained to the width of the mind, spinning and jerking within a stranded exterior. Deep, restless cello incisions prise apart synapses and disconnect streams of thought, while flutes flit back and forth like eyes alternating between two entities, trying to comprehend their co-existence.

It’s cinematic, and there is always a whole landscape of happening at any one time. And yet, there is an eco-system dependency rustling through the Black Earth Ensemble, causing the instruments to veer toward mutual change in spite of their explicit difference – the tumbling, rhythmic cylinder of “The Ooli Moves” causes a raucous outbreak of sudden swerves and fierce clarinet glottalstops, while “Dripping Matter” sounds like a ceiling of syrup giving way in viscous, drooping strands of overlapped glissando. The record is driven by a jazz mystique that curls upward like smoke – awash with those suspended platforms of unresolve, peering over the edge of silence – yet there is a deliberate and tumultuous confusion at work that causes the group’s vision to buckle and spill over into all kinds of places: babbling Tourette explosion, earthly percussive hypnosis, prisms of luminous modern classical noise. Intergalactic Beings is a narrative of volatility and absent consequential foresight, and the Black Earth ensemble are unflinchingly willing to follow it anywhere.

Tracklist:

1. Phases of Subduction
2. Cycle of Metamorphosis
3. The Ooli Moves
4. Dripping Matter
5. Negotiating Identity
6. Web of Hope
7. Fields of Possibility
8. Resisting Entanglement
9. The Inevitable

Personnel:

Nicole Mitchell: flute, composition
Mankwe Ndosi: vocals
David Boykin: tenor sax, bass clarinet
David Young: trumpet, sralai thom
Renée Baker: violin
Tomeka Reid: cello
Jeff Parker: electric guitar
Joshua Abrams: bass
Avreeayl Ra: percussion
Marcus Evans: drumset