When FIM kicked off in January 2024, it was the CD by Stalwart (the quartet of label founders Caleb Duval and Luke Rovinsky with Ben Eidson and James Paul Nadien) that felt most like a mission statement. Raucous and irreverent, intentionally dissonant, as interested in being combative as in arriving at some sort of cursed textural harmony, the music was and is emblematic of what I see as an exciting movement away from stylistic stagnancy and calcifying tropes in contemporary improvised music. If Blessed was the manifesto, then Enough Nihilism is the praxis. Duval (double bass) and Rovinsky (electric guitar) are once again joined by skin-shredding partner in crime Michael Larocca for this follow-up to HI-FI LO-IQ and various one-off collaborations, and the single-day, nearly eighty-minute session is their most ambitious release yet. Weasel Walter’s liner notes, though deservedly effusive, adopt an angle I find a tad reductive; while I agree that the material is a breath of fresh air in an overcrowded, “overeducated” tradition, his characterization of it as “relentlessly assaulting form and maintaining a ceaseless, bloody-minded aural intensity” misses the mark. Not only are there actually some almost tender bits here, the trio’s interplay is also less about “deconstructing” or “vandalizing” conventions and more about building their own. Sure, there’s disruption—all signs point to Duval trafficking the pop fragments (radio? sampler?) yet no one takes official credit, probably to avoid legal and/or moral culpability—but there’s also connection, moments where things which cannot or should not coexist do so anyway, and they’re beautiful. Larocca’s spider skitters and predilection for brushes pair well with Duval and Rovinsky’s string tension abuse. They get almost jazzy on “Highland Park”, then meld symbiotically with Chief Keef toward the end of “Green Jacket and Maroon Fleece.” The hard panning starts to wear on the ears a bit, and sometimes the more conventional drum rhythms throw a wrench in the momentum rather than pushing anything forward, but that’s just a natural part of taking real musical risks—not all of them pay off. Hoping to see these guys play this year, I can’t imagine it isn’t a blast to see.
Noise Not Music 