Electronica is quite a big area within an affinity for any forward looking jazz listener these days certainly jump started once again by Floating Points last year. But what the long running Leverton Fox trio project does is completely different and a leap away from spiritual sounds. Instead it is more an environmental homage.
Jazz trumpeter and electronica musician Alex Bonney - with another sound engineer hat on the consultant used for the sonic makeover of the Vortex recently and also a valued collaborator with Sun Chung on the South Korean producer's new Red Hook label - drummer Tim Giles and electronics personage Isambard Khroustaliov (Sam Britton) use Sussex woodland outdoors field recordings that prove significant here in the Leverton Fox latest iteration of the by now familiar vulpine sound.
Serene pervasively 'Amethyst Deceiver' yet again with this band recalls an In a Silent Way mood given the way the trumpet floats and progresses in stately fashion. But the woodland reacts in the guise of a mysterious, ever changing incrementally, chorus as a mainly benevolent if at times ambivalently ominous foil.
The use of analogue synths makes this sound untechnological in a way in other words what the overall effect becomes unlike a lot in the genre is not at all obviously manufactured.
A restful, stimulating listen where experimentation becomes meaningfully site specific it's a decade since we saw the band reviewing the band live at the Vortex for Jazzwise in a very well put together double bill with Sons of Kemet. That sound heard in 2012 still has validity. The frank amalgam of improv-friendly electronica that avoids the tired ticks and clichés of click-glitch nebulousness still counts for something.
Leverton Fox play an In the Flicker launch surround sound gig complete with light show at iklectic, London on 19 October. See also: Not Applicable - on Bandcamp
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