SONAR & DAVID TORN: TRANCEPORTATION VOL.2

4.5 stars. My kind of music. I can't get over how the tritone guitars and bass changes their sound. Reminds me of KING GIZZARD and their microtonal drums, bass and guitars that they have used on some albums and how it changes their sound as well, and in both cases for the better. And having the legendary David Torn on here doesn't hurt does it? A match made in heaven is SONAR and David Torn. David plays his usual guitar and adds live looping. By the way SONAR always record live in studio with a lot of improvising. I'm going to quote Stephan Thelan in this review a lot because the best review I've seen is his in the liner notes.

Love the grainy and blurry picture of this band under the actual cd, so cool. Thelan talks about how throughout his life music has been the vehicle to take him places as he wears those headphones. Of course the title "Tranceportation" is fitting. For me music has always been about being the soundscape for where I am going whether walking, running, biking or mostly driving. Since I was a teenager actually. Post-Rock and Electronic are awesome for these treks but this album with it's precise beats, pulses and string sounds works very well for this. It sounds dark because of the tritone and then Torn comes in soloing as he does. Love this!

Thelan mentions "This time, we wanted to bring the raw emotional aspect of David's playing even more forward than on the last album "Vortex", so we consciously chose to keep the compositions as open as possible. This left space for improvisations and spontaneous surges of power, knowing that David's ability to improvise, his otherworldly atmospheres and infectious energy would inspire and ignite all kinds of group interplay".

We get four long tracks adding up to 42 minutes. There is a guest adding as Thelan says "his glitchy and granular electronics" to "Cloud Chamber" the closer. By the way the man's name is Werner Hasler and while he plays electronics in bands he's also a trumpet player and how good would the trumpet sound in this music? I mean distasteful, dissonant and experimental. Come on! So we get three guitarists, a bass player and drummer. I have to mention "Slowburn" my favourite track. Thelan says "It started with a line in 9 Bernard came up with while exploring his echoplex. I asked David to play something similar in mood to what he did on David Sylvian's "The Boy With A Gun", a track I deeply admire." I love that Sylvian song as well.

Anyway I'm a huge fan of this record, love every track.