Joe Westerlund — Mojave Interlude

You know when you get one of those albums that promises to be wonderful from what you’ve read? One of those albums you think you’ll play to death just from the description? Well this is one of those albums.

I’ve heard very little of Joe Westerlunds' music prior to this, but from the description the album sounds stunning: "created with a wide array of percussion instruments, utilizing a variety of techniques, and processed with analog and digital electronics...Additional instruments and found sounds”

This sounds like a stunning foray into musique concrete. And in a way it is. There’s a mix of percussion, found sound and field recordings, and in the main these come together and work brilliantly. However, this mixture of sounds works best when allowed to develop naturally. There are points where the sounds become improvised and at those points a “free jazz” element occurs that really doesn’t do it for me. However, and thankfully, those elements are very few and far between.

This is like a Nurse With Wound studio session (circa “Brained By Falling Masonry”) with an Ornette Coleman session drifting in through an open studio door. The two tracks, that span over 14 minutes each make this albums running time. And it really is quite wonderful whole. Right, the albums finished, and I’m listening to it again now.