J Spaceman

Breaking form from the more overtly free jazz-oriented agenda the Treader label has based itself upon, this release finds Jason Pierce of Spiritualized and Spacemen 3 tackling a lengthy piece of music assembled from electronically treated guitar loops (as you no doubt guessed from the title) and a bit of lo-fi percussion. The resultant thirty five minutes of music is an enormously dynamic, often rather difficult venture into the avant-garde, far-removed from the trance-inducing pop Pierce built his name on. There's a great deal of sophisticated noise tinkering at work here, and the loops themselves aren't built from the customary drone tones but rather highly energetic guitar phrasings and full-on string assaults. That said, the sound materials that get thrown together on these recordings vary from near silent amp hiss textures to marauding distortion, and there's no linear build-up as is so often the case with these long-form experiments, instead there's an unpredictable stream-of-consciousness approach that makes the whole thing sound thoroughly liberated.