Electric NHIC, Ground Waves

Electric NHIC is a more polished avant electric offshoot of Bob Gorry's New Haven Improvisers Collective. It consists of Gorry (on electric guitar) and seven hand-picked instrumentalists who can thrive in a highly free-improvised DIY avant jazz-rock-funk setting.

With some compositional signposts along the way, they set off on a great adventure in their Ground Waves (NHIC 007). This is local music, a modern territory band with a DIY sense of anything goes. The collective ensembles that come out of their interactions together give the listener a kind of Americana psychedelic jam ethnicity.

This is music you yourself might have played in garages across the east coast if you and your running buddies were of the adventurous sort years back--spontaneous and matter-of-fact, mindless of professional demands from club owners or unsuspecting, uncomprehending audiences who are not there to be uplifted but more to be besotted and debauched. That ethic is taken seriously and developed into cohesive-anti-cohesive ensemble music of real consistency-aconsistency.

So it's free music that is refreshingly free of the need to impress paying audiences with slick showband presentations. Quite the opposite.

And with the years the NHIC, particularly in the electric incarnation, have evolved a DIY garage art that just keeps getting better while remaining unpretentiously unschooled. There is a highly contrapuntal collective mayhem going on here that no one else quite does. Is it good? Is it art? Yes, but not in the usual ways.

This is a great set of it. It will bring some smiles to your face, I think, as well as get you grooving on its avant-for-the-people (in the band) approach!