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P'taah
Staring at the Sun
label: ubiquity records
released: 03.03.03
our score: 4.0 out of 5.0
buy
it: here
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Whenever I
am dragged into a club, I often marvel at how bad the music is.
It's not just that it sounds it's made by someone who sold their
soul to Satan and now has to avoid his nightly phone calls begging
for a refund. It's also the brutal anonymity of it all. While
some K-head might wax unconscious about how seamless it sounds,
for my buck, it's just a skittering void, punctuated with an occasional
loop of voice, and a beat that is to dancing what paint by numbers
is to the Italian Rennaissance. Someday I swear to you, we'll
find out that club music was actually delivering traitorous missives
to hostile extra-terrrestrials, giving them detailed instructions:
a roadmap for our misery and eventual domination. I say this to
let you know that I'm an extremely hard sell for a techno record.
While I love many of the innovators of the genre, I usually pull
out my hatchet for anything like the sucker punch that is your
typical techno effort.
P'taah is
unlikely to be coming to a dance floor near you. The press kit
calls P'taah a collective and I have no fucking clue what that
means. Maybe it just means that when they're not making music
together, they're arguing about dirty dishes and phone messages
that never made it to a post-it note. But when they aren'ts waxing
utopian with Chumbawumba, they apparently also make effortlessly
enthralling records with undercurring waves of R&B, Brazilian
music, and jazz.
Chris Brann,
the totalitarian godhead of the collective (I'm just guessing),
crafts a compelling free flowing ricochet for the rest of the
album's performers to work through. Sylvia Gordon's vocals on
"Staring at the Sun" are some of the most muscularly
entrancing I've ever heard on a techno record. Whereas many club
divas sound like they're auditioning for Sister Act 10, Gordon's
vocals are dropped in under the tightest reins, as if each and
every note is wrapped around her Badu-like fingers. Though many
of the jungled jook joint numbers are impressive, my favorite
tracks on "Staring at the Sun" are those that seem to
come at jazz in the more loose-spliffed Kruder and Dorfmeister
vein. "Meditation 3" takes tidal piano riffs and washes
them through an extended zig-zagging set of drums. Eight minutes
of "Surrendering" and you will be wholly disarmed by
Brann's gently landing chill-out epic. There are more than a few
moments on "Staring at the Sun" that rise above the
status of designer drug back drop and demand a deeper ear.
Not all of
the tracks successfully mine their targets. "Nobody Knows"
with its dire, deadpan vocals make it an interesting slant on
a classic song (and again, Gordon's voice is a slice of restrained
heaven), but it falters in its adherence to the house convention:
repeat it once and it's cool so surely five thousand times equals
perfection. There's a not so fine line between meditative repetition
and home dentistry. "Beneath an Autumn Star" feels like
equal parts bad pass in a cheap bar and shop til you drop with
its disemboweling saxophone presence. But those moments are minor
ripples.
Like Funky
Porcini's "Fast Asleep", P'taah are set to seamlessly
merge the improvisational chemistry of jazz musicians into the
world of electronica. Though this isn't clearly on the musical
ground I love most, P'taah are staking out a space worthy of attention
and a top shelf shot of praise.
24-Feb-2003 10:30 PM
If you
liked Staring at the Sun...
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Tracklist:
1. Meditation
2. Become Who You ARe
3. Nobody Knows
4. Late Night Sun
5. Oldest Story
6. Meditation 2
7. Staring At The Sun
8. Beneath An Autumn Star
9. Hold You Close
10. Meditation 3
11. Path
12. Arise
13. Surrendering
14. Passages
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