Beach Fervour Spare

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'For a mystical music,' says Clive Bell in the sleevenotes to this, the second outing of Jah Wobble's Deep Space, 'this album may seem a bit robust, a bit visceral maybe." Well, yeah. The group's eponymous debut, released, like its successor, on Wobble's own 30 Hertz label, brought together several sessions with sundry line-ups (fellow bassist Bill Laswell and Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit being the real heavyweights.) On Beach Fervour Spare, things have pretty much settled down to the current Deep Space touring group: drummer Mark Saunders, Clive Bell and Jean-Pierre Rasle on an improbable range of woodwinds, horns and pipes and Wobble himself laying down his trademark hard-grooving basslines. Joining them for a bunch of sessions recorded in 1999 between live dates were: Paul Schütze, hammond organ improviser Alex Maguire and guitarist Chris Cookson (now a permanent addition to the group, I gather.) Engineer Mark Lusardi should also be credited as a musician here, for his dub production is as much part of the music as the playing. Anyhow, Bell is right, no matter how hard this stuff is, it's mystical stuff: deep trance music, with giant swirls of dubbed-out wind parts flying around a riffing core as hard as concrete and tight as a gnat's arse. It's all improv; nothing is prepared before studio sessions, the players instead settling into spontaneous grooves and atmospheres. The lack of preparation helps the music avoid the pitfalls of overly fussy orchestration that all-too-frequently beset music with similar Fourth World inclinations. There is no place in Deep Space for frills. Special mention should go to the rhythm section. A couple of the sessions here apparently mark the first times Wobble and Saunders had got together. If that's the case, it makes their playing even more remarkable. For theirs is a truly symbiotic pairing, supplying some of the most inspired rhythm work, well, since Can. Deep indeed.