When saxophonist Tim Berne and guitarist David Torn convened a special band for a club date in January 2024, they did so knowing they wouldn’t be able to take their show on the road to spread the good vibes. That’s why, merely weeks after the release of Berne and Torn’s last project, we’re gifted with a memento of this occasion.
Disco Tent/Ravens Low & Ready 2 represents another permutation of the mix-and-match approach Berne (and Torn) has long undertaken in assembling a team to make music that’s more the product of how individual personalities come together than of following a certain set of guidelines for how that music is made. By altering the chemistry they alter the results, even if the basic formula for generating the music remains the same.
That’s why I tend to view Berne bands by their substitutions to establish a starting point for understanding how it differs from the music made before. In this case, the line-up of Berne, Torn, Tom Rainey and Trevor Dunn is the Torn-led Prezens band, minus a keyboardist (Craig Taborn) and plus an electric bassist (Dunn).
As Prezens did when they played a live gig, this band delivers an extended spontaneous piece live, but that performance is enhanced by Torn’s live looping, injecting electronics into the organic creation, only that Torn creates the electronics itself organically. This is the secret sauce to all Prezens/Sun of Goldfinger editions that’s layered on top of elite improvisational facility, making every performance a unique sonic art piece that will never be replicated.
Inserting Dunn into the mix adds another point of intrigue unique to this album, and there’s a single performance to examine his impact – because the lone, 53 minute track “Disco Tent/Ravens Low & Ready 2” is the album.
This hour-long expedition is rawer than most prior recordings of this band and its variants, which is probably another way of saying the guys leaped into the abyss with more vigor than usual. Even when things sound particularly chaotic, Dunn’s lumbering, fat notes can be detected (probably a credit to Torn’s remastering) that gives these instant, loosely-shaped harmonies a center that maybe wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
Starting around the fourteen-minute mark, a period of relative calm emerges from the wreckage of a sonic onslaught, and Dunn can be heard playing taut, scattered lines as Torn and Berne build on it. As is standard for Berne, he more than once comes up with a figure just at the right time that keeps the proceedings moving right along. Rainey’s snare-biased attack grooves, swings, freestyles; often all at once. Torn turns on a dime from metal monster to ambient sorcerer and all personas in between, blurring the distinctions between his guitar virtuosity and deft deployment of effects.
All of these components together make an instant album that’s explosive, urgent and intense, even when it isn’t loud. Luckily, the proof of magic happening that night has been preserved.
Get Disco Tent/Ravens Low & Ready 2 right now from Bandcamp.
Sunny Five – Candid
Sun of Goldfinger
David Torn – Prezens
Time Berne – Oceans And
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