$.99 Dreams have expanding my horizons with their experiments with jazz, their penchant for tone generators, and their need to inject doom into the ambience they create.
Three Songs For Another Time is all but one song, shifting between its three parts, $.99 Dreams languishing in the jazz ethic, their need to improvise, experiment, it feels as this recording was captured in one take, with respectful nods to Miles Davis and Sun Ra. You could call this free jazz, or the first part at least, and this is a change in direction for $.99 Dreams, previous work being more traditional versus experimental, whereas this starts firmly with history in mind. The second song shifts to straining tones of electronics, otherworldly emanations. Tribal percussion under-pin the flurry of keys and glacial tones, showing a lighter brighter side to $.99 Dreams… Song three nods to Pharoah Sanders, a spiritual jazz odyssey, shunning the mayhem of Sun Ra in favour for structure and purpose. The song becomes motorik, almost as if it’s a building introduction to a krautrock monster.
These guys really deserve more exposure, every time I listen to their material; it makes me want to dig out old, lost jazz albums. Amazing. Get it here. I hear rumours of more releases soon, I certainly hope so.
Wayne Stronell
