- Details
- Daniel Rorke
- Parent Category: Jazz Ireland Blog
- Album Reviews
Shane Latimer is one of the most truly unique musicians I know. Not merely a prodigious talent when playing straight-ahead Jazz, he is also a singularly arresting practitioner of Free Jazz and “Improvised Music” (whatever that is). In recent years he has turned his death-ray-like musical stare in the direction of electronica, using synthesisers and other occult means of interacting technologically with sound to produce consistently surprising results. The result of his years of experimentation is Residuum available through Diatribe Records, the title of which is allegedly not a commentary upon the government’s housing policy.
It would serve you well to cast aside any assumptions you may have about both Jazz musicians and electronic music before you enter Latimer’s world. This is not your father’s Jazz-musician-makes-electronic-stuff album. I could not possibly begin to assign any sense of genre to this music. It is surely a record filtered through the guitarist’s exceptional knowledge of aesthetic, form, harmony, and structure, however the result reveals itself like a fractal landscape of sonic shapes and events that sprout new lands and new topography at every turn. Expectation and supposition are the enemy of experience here. Comparisons or congruencies don’t apply. This music is its own thing and I advise clean ears when approaching it.