SUPERHELIX (WITH RISA TAKEDA)

Superhelix is the second in a long stretch of collaborative live albums by Yoshida and keyboard player Risa Takeda and showcases a strong performance even if it doesn't quite capture lightning in a bottle like it's predecessor Hue, in whose footsteps it closely follows, consisting mainly of dissonant, high-energy and improvisations that continually reinvent themselves. In fact, this album confirms my earlier suspicion that Hue wasn't wholly improvised and that the performers did prepare some cues (it's not until the duo's later live releases that they really go off the deep end into the realm of free improv and undiluted noise), but these cues are more like loosely defined starting blocks than actual blueprints for the performance that results from them. To name some examples: "Halcyon" starts off with the same piano and Mellotronish flute samples as "GZ" on the previous album but ends up in a different, far more noisy and multi-structured direction than its predecessor. Likewise, "Spiro" has a similar ending to "PHT" in spite of the rest of the song sounding different, and "Aurora" starts off with the same synth riff as "LTC" but instead of a synthy jazz fusion jam we get a dissonant piano-led free jazz session.

While Superhelix is certainly no less exhilirating and attention-demanding than Hue, I don't think it's as diverse and also not quite as unique because Yoshida and Takeda don't succeed as well in building up grooves or creating order out of chaos here, and they rely a bit too much on the same tricks: Yoshida throws in his Christian Vander impersonations a little too often regardless of whether or not they fit with their environments, and a lot of tracks end with a similar series of synchronous drum blasts and cluster chords. Nonetheless, Superhelix certainly manages to deliver the goods at its best moments. The aforementioned "Halcyon" and "Aurora" are great, "Ritualize" and the title track are solid fusion jams that move through several tempo changes, "Obsdian" (sic) sounds like a mad polka from hell and "Rupture" starts off resembling an accursed chorale in a haunted church before gradually building up intensity and speed, turning itself from a dissonant piano march into another lightning-fast jazz track with Takeda pulling out a distorted organ sample. Finally, "Kaos" is just a dazzling accomplishment, travelling from a slow march to a syncopated prog riff and to bunch of arrhythmic noise before recovering and building itself up into a new powerful prog melody yet again (perhaps the only moment where the album actually displays something that could be called catchy).

Like all albums in this series, Superhelix demands a lot of tolerance for unruly, dissonant and generally unconventional music but if you're willing to take that leap, or if you're a big fan of Ruins, the Flying Luttenbachers or King Crimson's Thrakattak album then this gets a big recommendation from me.