your greedbagpress release - A Flat Inside a Fog / The Cat That Was a Dog
From the initial keystrokes of Bablicon's third album, it's obvious that the Chicago-based trio is moving in new directions. Conceived as a double album, A Flat Inside a Fog, the Cat That Was a Dog is an epic construction unlike any the group has created to-date. Recorded on 16 tracks at Chicago's Truckstop Audio, A Flat Inside a Fog is distinctly more hi-fi than both its predecessors, In A Different City and The Orange Tapered Moon. Bablicon's progress reveals itself not simply through truer sonic quality, but also by the dense and wide-ranging composition on the album.
Previous Bablicon albums paired improvisation with loosely structured songs, but A Flat Inside a Fog was meticulously composed beforehand. With a heavier emphasis on piano-based composition, the band displays newfound virtuosity and tunefulness, bathed in live electronics and improv sizzle. Their multi-faceted barrage of sound touches on contemporary classical and jazz, as well as electronic music and avant-rock. On some of their most caffeinated numbers to date, Bablicon forge a whole new path. Epic in every sense of the word, A Flat Inside a Fog is Bablicon's most sprawling and diverse recording, but retains more focus than anything the band has ever done. This is Bablicon's most complete work to date.
"Bablicon have somewhat reined in their fractious urges on this latest opus, forging a sound that hints at Van Dyke Parks classicism one minute, Middle Eastern flavoured jazz the next, with Michael Nyman-style contemporary composition in the spaces between. Sprawling, audacious, but always intriguing, 'A Flat Inside a Fog' is the sort of singular meisterwerk that fashion may condemn to cultish obscurity, but upon which posterity is destined to smile benignly." [David Sheppard, Mojo]
release:A Flat Inside a Fog / The Cat That Was a Dog
label: Pickled Egg Records