Spool3

This collaboration between San Francisco-based keyboardist/producer Jhno and Chicago-based guitarist/bassist John Ridenour (of the Aluminum Group) matches live improvisation with ambient and jungle production values in a manner not far removed from Jhno's solo work, though it is certainly distinctive enough in its own minutely detailed ways. The album opens with the gorgeously percussive ambient drum'n'bass of "Ebo," a 14-odd minute cut that alternately sizzles tensively and broods over live jazz drumming and a Peter Hook-like bassline before moving into "Algo," which contains some of the slow-simmering groove, the same stoned dub bass, and cool-jazz-to-ambient, easygoing-weekend vibe of Jhno's solo work. On "Joni," the duo brings an interest in gamelan to bear on the music's rhythmic underpinning, making the song chaotic and stormy, but it never devolves into messiness or incomprehension. Instead, Spool uses the musical turbulence as an instrument of contemplation, to get at the nerve-ending levels of an emotion, a tonal color. In general, Spool bears more than a passing resemblance to Jhno's second album, Kwno. The modus operandi is smoky-cool dry-ice jazz. You can never quite figure out if it burns or chills, but that doesn't matter because the music scintillates with its organic electronics, pulsing the blood flow and firing up the synapses. The drum'n'bass rhythms add a gauze of mystery to the washes of textural, spacious sound so that the songs seem at once insular but urban, spectral but lyrical. But there are differences as well. Spool incorporates, though almost subliminally, more elements of slow funk such as gritty organ and keyboards, and deep bass grooves play a much more up-front part of Spool. Case in point is "All," which builds off a backdrop that is pure West Coast funk, and so contrasts a sense of indolent lightheartedness — particularly in the low end — with a miniscule but piercing nostalgic tendency. In addition, where Jhno's work is perhaps more kinetic, the duo's songs are more viscerally evocative in that they are not content to unravel an image, instead gradually revealing a vista. Though Spool work on the most ambient side of electronics, the music is impassioned and introspectively dense.