Dusted Reviews Artist: EKG & Giuseppe Ielasi Album: Group Label: Formed Review date: Apr. 20, 2007

EKG and Giuseppe Ielasi’s 2005 tour fell on hard times when Dean Roberts, the relatively big name who was supposed to accompany them through the Eastern US, bowed out at the last minute due to visa concerns. Nonetheless the (then) Chicago-based electro-acoustic duo and their Italian partner in altered sonics soldiered on, playing a series of concerts to small audiences. But while the crowds weren’t big, the endeavor can hardly be termed a failure; it yielded this attractively elusive recording, which doesn’t really sound like either an EKG (Ernst Karel — trumpet, analog electronics; Kyle Bruckmann — oboe, English Horn, and synth) record or anything I’ve heard by Ielasi (electronics, guitar, piano).

Group is not your ordinary live record. Instead Karel and Ielasi took raw recordings from the tour home and treated them as malleable raw material. On the first of the latter’s two unnamed tracks, a fine digital mist sprinkles over field recordings of some undefined activity. It could be someone cooking dinner, the group plugging in their gear, whatever; the open-air activity coexists with persistent hums and the dissenting voice of a forlorn piano. Then the environmental sounds give way to oscillating drones, but the piano continues its oblique commentary. The piece feels more like sound design for a film than music; to steal a phrase from Metamkine records, a cinema pour l’oreille.

Karel’s “(Providence-Middletown),” by contrast, is electronic but for a detuned guitar that’s as blurry and unreachable as some desert mirage. It’s probably an edit of live performances, but some wavering backwards loops and hard edits scramble any sense of linear time. The “group’s” synergy thus manifests at the organizational level, conflating EKG’s aural still lives and Ielasi’s more filmic sensibilities to manufacture a seemingly inevitable narrative flow that makes for a thoroughly rewarding listening.

By Bill Meyer

Read More View all articles by Bill Meyer Find out more about Formed