Throughout Gal Aner and and Jordan Czamanski's new three-LP release, there's a sense of the casual and the ad hoc, no doubt the result of the duo simply letting the tape run on studio sessions and paring them down into succinct tracks later on.
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When Israeli musicians Gal Aner and Jordan Czamanski met in a jazz trio setting in Haifa, they were doing post-bop gigs by day-- with Aner on guitar and Czamanski on keys-- and delving into electronic music in the wee hours, ultimately relocating to Amsterdam a few years ago and forming part of that city's burgeoning and nurturing dance scene. Across a dozen or so singles, they could be abstract or deep, jazzy or jackhammering, acidic or flashback-struck (audition the hallucinatory breakdown of "Deep Blue Meanies" off their second effort), tweaking dance music's tropes just enough.
But their musical ambitions began to crown last year when they released a single on Brooklyn's idiosyncratic dance imprint, Golf Channel. "Unleash the Golem Pt. 1" was a brooding and glowering 16 minutes, darker than anything else the duo had attempted, drawing on and questioning their heritage in the process. "Is Israel a modern golem created to protect the Jews but left to run amok? Is it an experiment bound for destruction?" went the 12"'s insert, the first installation in a planned four-part series of singles that will culminate with an experimental DVD. They then followed it up with a lascivious Italo track, "Jewsex" (complete with suggestive hamantaschen), to further confound expetations. As if that weren't enough, the duo now unleashes Techno Primitivism, an 85-minute album odyssey spread across three slabs of vinyl that finds them delving into almost everything but the dance music trope of the title.
No longer constrained to one side of a 12" dance single, Juju & Jordash sprawl out on Techno Primitivism with one of dance music's most astounding, adventurous and confounding sides of the year. "Stoplight Loosejaw/Diatoms/Backwash" is a 15-minute suite that begins with Czamanski hammering out low-octave piano chords with the sustain pedal down, the tones left to waft and commingle with a migraine throb, and effervescent gurgles as aleatoric as something Ricardo Villalobos might deploy. But whereas Villalobos presents a disorienting sense of stasis in his productions (or as a recent review put it: "like watching traffic"), the mood here shifts minute by minute, the compound volatile rather than stable. After the nuclear submarine-deep bass goes code red, the piano re-enters-- this time as percussive and plinking as one of John Cage's prepared pianos-- a brief glimpse of sunlight behind black thunderclouds. Nearing eight minutes, the synths distort and then turn blissful for a few moments and then menacing once again. And then there arise live drums and an unexpected bluesy guitar lick at the coda-- courtesy of Aner-- that will further confound expectations.
A primitive drum machine pulse and more of Aner's guitar make for a Cluster-like respite on the brief "Rogue Wave" before one of the album's strangely satisfying experiments, "Shakshuka Dub", suggests a strange world between John Zorn's Bar Kokhba compositions, Augustus Pablo's melodica-laced dubs and Mr. Fingers. Elsewhere, Juju & Jordash build "Track David Would Play" out of anxious ticks and sub-aquatic chords, revisiting the early-90s acid house of "Powwow" but inverting its components, the triggered snare and hi-hat hits not serving as meter, but embellishment. "Shrublands" scales from ominous to transcendent, courtesy of Czamanski's organ sliding between evoking Sun Ra and Steve Moore. The title track starts off spacy and off-kilter, slowly cresting with hand-drum patterns and slowed vocal mumbles while follow-up "Loosey Goosey" shimmers and crackles, one of the album's few unadulterated dancefloor cuts.
Throughout, there's a sense of the casual and the ad hoc, no doubt the result of the duo simply letting the tape run on studio sessions and paring them down into succinct tracks later on. These experiments never feel like forced eclecticism but rather spontaneity from two gifted players going deep into their machines. While free jazz, Jewish folklore, and the Holocaust might loom over their more serious "Golem" project, for Techno Primitivism, Juju & Jordan sound content to play.