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October 6, 2014 by Simon Sweetman

Mark Guiliana: Beat Music – The Los Angeles Improvisations

beat music laMark Guiliana

Beat Music: The Los Angeles Improvisations

Beat Music Productions

In a huge year for Mark Guiliana, the in-demand drummer, composer, beat-maker has started his own label, continued to guest and collaborate and co-create (including the excellent Taming The Dragon with Brad Mehldau under the name Mehliana) and simultaneously released two albums, two sides of the coin – I’ve already looked at My Life Starts Now which is wonderful, the composed set of pieces that showcase his skills as producer/beat-maker and song-shaper. The playing, of course, is wonderful, but My Life Starts Now was about the music as finished-piece and the way Guiliana got there and how (and when) he signed off on a finished piece.

This album is the flipside in a sense – still with some of the same sound, including his wonderful beat displacement as part of the hinge. But Beat Music’s Los Angeles Improvisations – as the matter-of-fact title part-explains is the end result of one day in two albumsL.A., Guiliana is at the kit – sometimes triggering found sounds and samples and snapshots of 80s drums, sometimes playing acoustic, sometimes mingling acoustic and electric drum sounds – Jeff Babko is on keys, Tim Lefebvre on electric bass and Troy Zeigler adds electronics. That’s it. And in one day – in what feels like one long, rolling session – the resulting album consists of 30 tracks caught in the moment, song-idea improvisations barely dusted off, hardly shaped – they run from just 12 seconds in length through to four minutes, most are little snippets and beat-ideas, between one and two minutes in length. Many of them are fabulous.

And you can of course forgive anything that doesn’t quite strike it right instantly – for it’s not only part of a bigger piece, a little jig-saw bit being made to fit, it’s easy to dismiss anything that doesn’t (quite) work because for the most part this does. It’s exciting and just a little bit challenging and full of ideas. And refreshing to hear these ideas as still embryonic moments.

Some of this feels like Flying Lotus stripped back and interpreted by garage-jamming jazz band, some of it hints towards a future sound that DJ Shadow never quite got to (if he’d mark gkept searching on in the vein of The Private Press rather than going lazy in the studio and speed-dialling a few rappers to ruin things). Some of this sounds like ideas we might yet hear Guiliana use again, develop, reinterpret. As a standalone it’s good enough – but the excitement in this release is knowing that it’s just part of a busy period, a purple patch in creativity from one of the shining talents. It’s a little bookmark, a series of bookmarked moments. An aural save-the-date. And taken in tandem with the amazing moments on My Life Starts Now it’s an impressive effort from Guiliana. (Another).

Posted in Blog, Reviews and tagged with Album Review, Beat Music, Beat Music: The Los Angeles Improvisations, Beat-Maker, Brad Mehldau, Drummer, Drums, Mark Guiliana, Mehliana, My Life Starts Now, Taming The Dragon, The Los Angeles Improvisations. RSS 2.0 feed.
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