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.
I know many Jazz musicians that dabble with electronics, yet have never known anyone to work with these sorts of electronic tools in the way Latimer does. I have noted during his past concerts and projects that everything is very organic; he rarely works in a way where duplication is possible, manipulating the signal paths and treatments like some sort of Jazz Frankenstein birthing life from a complex conflagration of un-alive body parts.
The sources may have been pre-existent source material and reworked elements from previous projects, but the processes that gave each of these tracks the spark of sentience was primal and uncontrived in the extreme. Reused parts, including string and clarinet pieces from an unsuccessful film score pitch, have been stitched together and filtered though his fantastic machines, and a rod sent up to the sky to await the lightening. Yet when the maniacal laughter, and hands raised tauntingly to the sky gods, inevitably comes to a close, once again it is a compositional mind that is brought to bear upon the results.
There is a duality at work here between moment and mechanics, impulse and introspection. I was fortunate to be privy to an early version of this record, which was already remarkable. But the result has been worked, and re-worked many, many times since then. He himself explains that “I feel like I’ve stumbled across an extremely inefficient method of producing music”.
Residuum is actually defined as a chemical by-product, a leftover residue. In this recording life seems to have emerged from chemistry once again. The patchwork of these residues live, as a profound and one-of-a-kind music that I can not and will not do the disservice to attempt to describe in words. You just need to hear it.
It is available now at Diatribe Records.
Why not freak out the squares in your family and buy it as a Christmas present.
