Electronic Electric Electronic

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Electronic Electric Electronic has to rank as one of 99's stranger releases; documenting the musical mayhem generated in just one day last Summer by an ad hoc trio of remarkable improvisers, who've given themselves a name - Powerfield - and thus the hope that there might just be more to come. Powerfield are electronics manipulator Pat Thomas and Joe Gallivan and electric guitarist Gary Smith. Gallivan had been all but forgotten by contemporary jazz fans until the release a couple of years back of Love Cry Want, a live album actually recorded in 1972 with mysterious guitarist Nicholas and the late and literally great organist Larry Young. Yet Gallivan's career has been a remarkable one, bringing him into contact with musical mavericks as diverse as Gil Evans, John Surman and Soft Machine. But what's really remarkable about Gallivan is that he was working as an electronics manipulator - rather than as a keyboardist using synths - in jazz years before anyone could really get their head around the idea. His work on Love Cry Want shows him turning the Mini Moog inside out, truly investigating its potential. the younger Englishman Thomas is from the next generation of electronics abusers, whom I first came across in the early 90s at a Company Week performance in an ear-shredding quartet with John Zorn, Buckethead and Derek Bailey. Over the last few years his singular use of electronics has been getting wider recognition, as increasingly he matches his scrabbling, jerky, fidgety electronics to beats. Smith meanwhile continues to develop as one of the most exploring guitar players alive, his trademark stereo guitar gracing such projects as his own Mass power trio with drummer Lou Ciccotelli and bassist Gary Jeff and the recent Rhys Chatham project recorded for the Wire magazine's record label. What characterises each of these players is the depth of information in all of their playing, so this unrehearsed session, recorded sans-mixing straight to DAT could have been a total mess.Instead what's apparent here is a sense on each player's part of wanting to create structure out of nowhere. Which isn't to say there aren't times when proceedings are totally full-on.God, no. There are occasions here of almost unbearable intensity, with Smith's guitar pitch-shifted out of all recognition and locked in combat with shrieking synths and loops. But everyone knows how far to push things. This isn't an exercise in musical grossing out, but rather an adventure, a process of finding musical common ground that takes place in front of our very ears so to speak. Dense, for sure, but with moments of almost delicate suspension. Pure improv, at its imaginative best.