Featured Artist: lim

CD Title: Superlim

Year: 2007

Record Label: Kopasetic Records

Style: Free Jazz / Avante Garde

Review:

The Free-jazz trio lim, from Malmo, Sweden, display a proclivity for impromptu musical wanderings born from the imagination and bred through avant-garde techniques and Modern-free outgrowths. Their songs are mainly Blues-free tints moored by sparse rhythms and conditioned with bluesy wavelengths emitted from Henrik Frisk’s saxophone, David Carlsson’s bass, and Peter Nilsson’s drum strides. Their freelance quills and coiling textures have a common factor with avant-garde performances by Grachan Moncur III, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders. The absence of defining melodies gives the songs a free-for-all form with installations of dawdling notes, sauntering rhythms, and improvised musical ideas. The mobility and shapes of the sonic craters and composites are personally determined by their creator, crafting a plethora of disoriented and contorted sound constellations.

Lim’s current album, their sophomore release Superlim, is Sound Art at its highest level of freedom. The music has reflections of the experimental jazz phrases presented in the ‘60s avant-garde films made famous by director Federico Fellini and still practiced in many Parisian jazz parlors. From the start, the listener feels like an observer with tracks like “Shulaffel” and “Vito” spritzing drum strokes and pacifying bass tugs as sprinting saxophone notes poke through the rhythm links, sprouting tingling outgrowths along the chord progressions. There is a sense of uncertainty in the sax notes about what to play and where to go as the instrument pulses interact and act as a catalyst for each others frequencies and nebulas. The direction and progression of the instrument lines are unpredictable, testing the waters and taking risks, curiously venturing outside of the Blues-jazz discipline.

The drifts in the series of notes are extemporized and inventively orchestrated, making the listener a mere watcher of this expedition. At times, the music has an opiate feel like “Nephilim” and “Getting’ Tage,” possessing a Stoner-jazz inflection, and at other times, the music is like Math-jazz manipulating the notes configurations and brightness like on the tracks “Captain Anna (And His Crew)” and “TraneBird.” Sax notes are inverted, exaggerated, elongated, and shortened at whim, fluxing between languid and dizzying motions. The final track “Re: Happy” tests different sonic combinations, varying the tempo and stanza ranges and thickening up the textures. Notes are more stressed and hurried creating a formation of bristling dynamics.

Lim’s tooling with rhythms and notes resonance explores organic movements and shapes of sounds. The band which formed 10 years ago, builds a forum for rhythmical freedom and contorted structures that bend and twist in ways that are completely unique and avant-garde. Ancient folk tales insist that the power of three is extremely potent and lim shows that to be certifiably true.

Tracks:

Shulaffel, Nephilim, Vito, Getting’ Tage, Captain Anna (And His Crew), TraneBird, Re: Happy

Record Label Website: http://www.kopasetic.se

Artist's Website: http://www.henrikfrisk.com

Reviewed by: Susan Frances

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