PRESS

ABC Magazine, Limelight - Severence Review

John Shand, ABC Magazine Limelight,  October 2003.

Band of Five Names Severance

Slater, McMahon and Barker also constitute Band of Five Names, the bespoke improvising project of these three friends who work together so much in many different groups.  This is immediately obvious from the cohesion of their musical explorations, from the sense that McMahon’s piano and keyboards, Slater’s trumpet and laptop and Barker’s drums and electronics are all one instrument.  It reflects their shared playing history, listening tastes and musical sensitivities.  More importantly, it reflects their shared ability to let the music unfold without imposing their instruments upon it, as they find original, slow-motion dramatic contours with which to tell their aural stories.  Even more than with Strobe Coma Virgo, these three have largely shrugged aside the conventions of jazz.  The trumpet tends to emit lonely cries amid a desolation of electronic sighs and whispers.  On Tenth Mountain, the drums creep into this landscape and set up a jolting, disquieting rhythm.  The piano is central to Child and Machine, each note like a crystal of frost, until the laptop – the machine in question – invades the piece, almost malignantly, attracting the drum-kit like some henchman.  The originality of Barker’s rhythmic and textural conception is a highlight of the band, as is the sheer anguish of the trumpet (Third Bibble)  and the Beckett-like poetry and economy of McMahon’s playing.  Simply supurb.