Random Touch is a trio of American jazz musicians (plus a fourth member who is a filmmaker) from Crystal Lake, Illinois. Alchemy is their seventh album, and comes complete with an accompanying DVD. The music is entirely instrumental, and the style is a kind of ambient improv. The sound tends towards the amorphous – drummer Christopher Brown seldom plays orthodox rhythms, guitarist Scott Hamill likes volume swells and notes than fade in and out from nowhere, and keyboard player James Day goes for colour and texture rather than obvious melodies.
We read a lot in magazines such as The Wire about the New Weird America. Much of the time, New Weird America seems to mean a bunch of stoned longhairs jamming on acoustic guitars, gettin’ it together in the country, maaaan – i.e. rather like the Old Boring America. However, Random Touch may well be the real New Weird America.
When I first listened to this album, I thought it was just okay – I clocked the nice ambient textures and droney atmospheres, but that was about it. Then one morning, stuck at home on a sick day, I decided to have a look at the accompanying DVD. Normally I’m totally nonplussed by a CD/DVD package – the DVD component usually being a lame collection of promo clips/band interviews designed to sucker in hardcore fans. So I popped the Alchemy DVD into the player with low expectations. I started surfing through the short films, and got a pleasant surprise. There were no straightforward promo clips – instead these were short experimental films of the type you might see in an arthouse cinema or art gallery. And the visuals gave the music a whole new dimension – suddenly a profoundly strange vision of backwoods rural America, in all it’s Lynchian weirdness, was taking shape. In ‘Cyborgs of Unlimited Dementia’ we see two of the band dressed in dungarees, ankle-deep in a stream, dancing like Deliverance mountain men choreographed by Toni Basil. Pond-life and insects are fractalised and treated in ‘Insectiva Hallucinogenica’ for a deeply trippy effect. ‘Grafitti Mobilis’ looks like a Paul Klee painting slowly appearing and then dripping off your TV screen.
Also included on the DVD are some fascinating scenes of the musicians at work in their private rehearsal space, which would seem to be a huge converted barn. We see Random Touch creating music out of nothing – hitting, stroking, scraping the innards of a piano and other discarded bits and pieces. It’s a bizarre sight – three middle-aged men looking like scruffy, off-duty science lecturers – totally unselfconscious, and utterly absorbed in their strange music-making – a most peculiar alchemy indeed.
Ewan Burke
