Prometheus Risen

Audio Mixers: Bill Palmer; Brian Haas.
Recording information: Frogville Records, Santa FE, NM.
Photographer: Joe Cappa.
The second album of instrumental music from pianist/keyboardist Brian Haas and drummer/programmer Matt Chamberlain, 2016's Prometheus Risen is a sci-fi and space-themed production that finds the duo expanding upon the exploratory and stylistically varied sound of their debut, 2013's Frames. The difference this time out is that while Frames featured a set of well-crafted and finely honed compositions, on Prometheus Risen Haas and Chamberlain present a set of songs that were all improvised live in the studio. These are ambient recordings, rife with sparkling, synth-heavy atmospherics, spiraling percussion segments, and crackling bursts of white noise and digital squelch. Despite the free-flowing nature of the session, the tracks never sound poorly executed or randomly conceived. In fact, many of the cuts, like the chilly, groove-oriented "Space Colonization" and the kinetic "Orange Purple Sunshine" with its roiling, jazzy Philip Glass-ian piano figure, sound as composed as anything off Frames. Partly this is due to Haas' use of riff-like melodic statements that Chamberlain plays off of, accenting each line with a call-and-response framework of percussive beats, both real and electronic. Other tracks, like the frenetic, bug-like "Ancestral Availability," the sprawling, gaseous "Holding Deckard's Hand," and acidic funky "Cosmic Vision," while born out of the same logical organic flow, sound more chaotic, like '70s fusion played in outer space. Similarly, cuts like "African Crowley," "Less Munitions," and "Neuro Quantum Adept" have a bombastically frenzied, hip-hop-meets-classical quality that sounds something like Russian pianist Sergei Rachmaninov backed by the Gorillaz. Ultimately, the tracks on Prometheus Risen have both a familiarity and an abstract randomness, as if radio waves broadcast out into space have been echoed back to Earth by alien hands. ~ Matt Collar