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The Sydney Morning Herald, Cloud Nine - Severence Review

John Clare, The Sydney Morning Herald, 11/03.

Band of Five Names Severance
Phil Slater Strobe Coma Virgo

The music on these discs – particularly the first one – is so remarkable that high-flown connections suggest themselves.  For instance, Debussy’s Clouds, the very soft sections of the same composer’s Iberia, Australian composer Richard Meale’s surpassingly beautiful . . . Clouds Now and Then, and some enthralling music from the area of ambient electronica (or whatever you want to call it).
Debussy’s tendency to present an idea and repeat it immediately, little changed, irritated some critics, but I always heard it as a signal that this was a painting as much as unfolding narrative.  It was as if he was presenting two frames of a film, with such deliberation that the action practically stopped.
An uncanny echo of this can be heard occasionally on the first disc here.  But this is not the only way that Band of Five Names, or Debussy for that matter, achieve a kind of frozen music.  Clear, sumptuous colours – radiant, transparent – seem to hang in the air, but of course everything is subtly changing, from frame to frame as it were.
Some of the colours are electronically produced, some come directly from Phil Slater’s trumpet, Matt McMahon’s piano and Simon Barker’s drums.  The acoustic sounds are themselves often electronically treated.  As with Debussy, intricate rhythms run and stop.  Indeed they seem to run and vanish, as if they had rushed toward you and away on a little loop.
Of course the music develops trancey grooves in its own good time.  There are also some brief passages of gale-force momentum; and there is some crystalline acoustic jazz interleaved with the electronics.
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