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The jazz-drum and bass interface has proved endlessly diverse, for sure. There have been down sides, of course. "Jazz" has always proved an irresistible signifier of sophistication for pop musicians, and dance music - jungle in particular - has certainly not been immune to its lure. Where that's the case you can bet you're in for some entirely pallid concoction. But the upside has been worth it; Squarepusher's Rotted One Note alone did that, let's face it. Where Flanger sit with all this, I'm not quite sure, but they do. Flanger are a duo of uber-prolific Frankfurt-based electronica composer Uwe Schmidt AKA Atom Heart (AKA I, Atomu Shinzo, Bi-Face, and Mike McCoy) and Burnt (or Bernd) Friedman (AKA Some More Crime, Drome and Nonplace Urban Field), and here they are on Ninja's home of the musically disenfranchised Ntone. The starting point of the music - recorded in Santiago de Chile in 1997 - seems to be, ahem, "real instruments. Friedman is credited with drums and percussion, Atom Heart with Fender Rhodes, bass, vibes and guitar. Of course, they're both credited with sampling. All of which seems to give an idea of the process at work here; live jams on "classic" electric jazz instrumentation later cut up and fucked up beyond recognition. But where, say, Paul Schütze with Phantom City and 16-17 (and that group's leader Alex Buess' latest project, Sprawl) use such techniques to up the ante in terms on intensity, Flanger instead use their post-production time to strip away ornamentation. There's a cool minimalism at work here which belies the music's origins, or its influences. The term "future jazz" gets bandied about all too liberally. Whether Friedman and Atom Heart give a monkeys about such descriptions, they've got a lot closer to it than most.