Friday, December 9, 2011

Empty Space Orchestra


If Mahavishnu Orchestra were still around today one can't help but wonder if they would sound like Empty Space Orchestra. No other band so easily synthesizes jazz, prog rock, post rock and unearthly levels of technicality, so seamlessly than this group of guys. Their self titled album plays itself out like one giant Ornette Coleman acid freak out. Taking fusion, mixing it with rock and then letting it run free, Empty Space Orchestra don't really make music in the traditional sense but rather allow the music to escape from them and do what it wants.

Empty Space Orchestra is epic in every sense of the word. Musicianship, epic. Songs, epic. The desire to fill every space with some sort of musical note, insatiable. This is an album that is almost too big for its britches and too big for your brain to handle. With incredible progressions, dark matter, and a sense of the imminent destruction of the world, Empty Space Orchestra takes jazz to places it's never been.

While much of the technicality of this record will be lost on the public, its widescreen mind numbing songs should not be. Empty Space Orchestra is an exploratory, experimental record that's easy to listen to because the band constructs their material in such a way that while it involves more music than your brain could ever hope to comprehend there are enough catchy bits (technical term) to latch on to that will keep you gripped. This is a fantastic record that takes everything you know about jazz and rock and turns it upside down and it's for these reasons that I thoroughly enjoyed this record.

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