Given the wide range of musical, cultural and philosophical interests of those involved, Passing Out, the third and final chapter in this trilogy, is fairly streamlined in its concerns. The single sixty-minute piece smoothly rides the unstoppable flow of the seismic rumble of monochromatic frequencies. A certain marasmus thus ferments in the heart of the album, makes its pulse slow to a shadow of itself, makes its girth grow intense, heavy, its textures inflamed, then glazed. As though a sort of body fluid on the verge of upheaval, there is indeed something both conscious and unconscious about its relentless and, in this sense, perverse search for an outlet.
A rigid control and submission before this necessity is shown in more or less equal measure. No consideration is given to soft fusion options or easy pastiche routes, neither is there anything grandiose or inflated about the development. Yet, in its tightness and formality, in its alignments of texture and coloration, and its finely judged interventions, which almost imperceptibly nudge familiar sounds into strangeness, the album is gutsy and urgent, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Owing to this last element, to the fact that its abscess is fed by brash, hard-edged tones, tiny crackling eruptions, and sepia voices that hover above like delicate, faded fresco. At one point, after the sense of isolation has spread like a fine layer of ice, the fragile hesitancy of a maudlin melody from the radio seeps into the unsettling intimate corners of the piece, like a brief remembrance of a worn, fragmented world. As much force as the piece might itself expend, there is therefore also a sense in which its efforts betray the manners and extent to which things exercise their own malign potency on us (the series is, after all, thematically concerned with the psychotropic effects of alcohol). Harm is continually brought to bear on this delicate ecosystem, itself tense and vulnerable. And since in the process there is no telling who spawned what or which element is acting or being acted upon, Passing Out assumes an appealingly problematic figure.
Max Schaefer
