By Brian Earley
Disc One
I remember sitting in the audience with my wife at the Philadelphia Art
Alliance in the spring of 2013. We were listening to The Engines, it was a
cool April evening, and the band’s signature combination of spontaneity and
precision was sharp that night.
I don’t wish to descend into nostalgia here, but I find myself thinking
frequently about Dave Rempis’s old band recently as I have acquainted
myself with his latest album for Aerophonic Records: Orbital.
Orbital is not a new album by The Engines, but it
isnew material from saxophonist Rempis, drummer Frank Rosaly, and
bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, a band that titled themselves The
Outskirts, and played together from 2007-2009, smack in the middle of the
years the Engines were active. While The Engines released a handful of
recordings, The Outskirts released exactly zero. In fact, if it weren’t
for Rempis’s now legendary COVID era 15-week, 15-livestream, 15-album
release series we would not have access to any recorded evidence of The
Outskirts at all.
On July 1, 2020
Dave took to the internet to perform solo and announce the release of the
album You Deserve To Dance by the Outskirts, a recording he tells
the audience that “never saw the light of day” because the original
“multitrack files that allow you to mix a record were lost in a terrible
hard drive accident.” The band, however, was given a rough stereo mix that
allowed Rempis, over a decade later, to release the music. That night on
the livestream, Dave did not perform any songs by The Outskirts, but he did
play “Four Feet of Slush,” song four on The Engines album
Wire and Brass
reviewed at the time by
The Free Jazz Collective.
“Four Feet of Slush,” it turns out, is the very first song on
Orbital
. Followers of Dave Rempis’s music will likely find this shocking as,
first, Rempis, who pushes so urgently forward in the moment, performs songs
from his past, and second, a Dave Rempis album contains
songs,written-out songs. I mean, Dave never does
this. His bands collaborate spontaneously, improvise live, sometimes for
hours, and these works get recorded and Dave releases some of them on
Aerophonic Records, often with the help of engineer Dave Zuchowski, artist
Lasse Marhaug and others.
And The Engines songs do not stop there. Listeners will recognize
“Cascades,” “Hover,” “Strafe,” and while it is not listed among the track
titles, “Going Dutch,” a deep track from a 2015 digital only Engines album
titled Green Knights. “Going Dutch,” found here on “Strafe-Glass
Part 1” however, reminds me of early Ornette Coleman albums, if Sonny
Rollins were the front man with the flexible time and forward swinging of
Billy Higgins and Charlie Haden. Or, more aptly, the tune reminds me of the
playing of still another Rempis band from the early aughts: Triage. In
fact, the one non-Engines song on this performance is “Glass,” a tune
recorded by Triage on 2003’s twenty minute cliff.
Orbital is far from reactive or sentimental, however. The trio
takes these songs and makes something new and strange out of them. See, for
example, the 8:25 mark of “Strafe,” when Dave and Frank explore improvised
atmospheric sounds, more searching than swinging. But Ingo, Rosaly, and
Rempis honestly sound like they are having a blast on this record and,
given a thematic basis for mood and timbre, the group launches ahead,
driving, laughing, and transforming these old tunes.
If you are anything like me, you would probably rather forget all about
2020, and on the Outskirts release stream from that July, before
playing “Four Feet of Slush,” Dave quips the song applies to the time:
“Let’s call it ‘Four Feet of Shit,’ how about that?” But those livestreams
and the accompanying releases raised thousands of dollars for working
musicians, and honestly helped me to stay afloat during that period of
uncertainty. The past, even without nostalgia, can light up the present,
as do my fond memories of the April concert in Philadelphia. So, although
we may be walking through four feet of shit again in 2026, The Outskirts
have arrived to provide the soundtrack one more time and to gift us a
little warmth where there was none before.
Orbital can be purchased artist direct at
https://www.aerophonicrecords.com/catalog.
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