I found this review of Eight Durations, which came out a bit under a year ago, yesterday. Stoked on a friendly, perceptive review from the Vital Weekly web page!
"M-KAT ENSEMBLE - EIGHT DURATIONS (CDR by Edgetone)
While listening to this album my mind starts to go on its journey. Thoughts about The Rita, Miles Davis interviews from the 1970s, Le Monte Young, films abrasively rescored live in the back rooms of pubs, being on a stag do in Prague and hearing some freak jazz being played and dragging the party in to watch for a drink only for them neck their pints and wait outside petulantly mumbling when it was my turn to pick the next bar, having to sit in the hallway of an arts centre during an all-dayer of experimental music as what was being played was too loud and complex for me to get my head around on a rainy Saturday night and a dozen other fragmented memories come to me only to be gone in a second. Effectively ‘Eight Durations’ is the kind of album that allows you to get all internal whilst getting lost in its rich melodies and tones.
The beauty of ‘Eight Durations’ is how the songs are constructed I real-time. There were no preconceived structures or patterns. They just started playing and this is what M-KAT came up with. ‘Duration 3’ is either build around the Kersti Abrams’ ponderous saxophone lines or Mark Pino’s drumming. I can’t work it out. Either way, it doesn’t matter as they both give the other musicians something tangible to work around. Instead of playing call and response motifs or trying to mimic the others playing on their respective instruments they just appear to be going for it. ‘Duration 4’ feels like the most abrasive, and adventurous, track on the album. There is a horrific vibe to it that just gets gut-wrenchingly worse as the song progresses. The basslines feel like they are being ripped from the bass, rather than being played by one. The percussion sounds like it was made up of anything at hand and the levels of distortion are fantastic. When the flute kicks in at the halfway point the songs go up a notch.
‘Eight Durations’ is cavernous and cacophonous. The final throws of ‘Duration 8’ are glorious in their organised disarray. Pino is just going at it on drums. Abrams is delivering measured saxophone line after line. The bass is consistent but vanishes due to the bedlam all around and Andrew Joron’s theremin appears to be missing in action. I don’t doubt it’s there but it is hard to pick out once the machine is up and running. This album is a dream. A very wonky and tumultuous dream, but a dream none the less. (SR"
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