Search - Mephista :: Entomological Reflections

The greatest jazz band on the planet.

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 06/01/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"You're kidding, right? (I hear the naysayers saying).Isn't it The Dave Holland Quintet?Or Keith Jarrett's Standards Trio?Or Dave Douglas's latest band?Or the Brad Mehldau Trio?Nope.It's three women who call themselves Mephista.This, their second recording, is nothing short of revelatory. Listen.This is the whole package. Covering the waterfront from freebop to electronica to avant-freakout, these ladies have thrown down the gauntlet.Who will pick it up?No one, I'm thinking: just too much power, res, emotion, and virtuoso playing.Let's start with Susie Ibarra. Fast becoming THE monster percussion presence on the New Music and Nu Jazz scene, she's the Evelyn Glennie of improvised music. Her two solo efforts, esp. Songbird Suite, her second, are beyond praise. Ikui Mori may be the most sophisticated and nuanced practitioner of electronics alive. Possessed of an uncanny ability to create the exact right electronic soundscape, she consistently imbues these proceedings with magical, mesmeric, life-giving and -breathing sensibilities. Too often electronics can come across as cold, static, or gratuitous.Not here. They're an absolutely integral part of the aural palette.Sylvie Courvoisier on piano (and it sounds like a bunch of prepared piano stylings), a name new to me, stamps these offerings with a unique sound signature that entirely fits in with the wild imaginings of the other two. Sometimes single-note configurations, sometimes cluster chords, sometimes bent sonorities, there's always something interesting--nay, intriguing--issuing from her keyboard.This music is so glorious, outré, striking, outrageous, and ravishing, that not to encounter it is to find oneself shut out from musical possibilities of the first order.Talk about serendipity.Talk about magic.Talk about advancing the aesthetic.This splendid music--beyond category, beyond imagining, beyond comprehension--cries out for hearing.If you somehow land on this site and read this review and don't drop everything and buy this astounding music, you will--I guarantee it--spend the rest of your sorry life and untold years of your afterlife regretting it--Purgatory bound, that's where you'll be.And I'm only half kidding."

Something different.

Michael Stack | North Chelmsford, MA USA | 07/01/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Mephista is a band that is hard to pin down. They are, in many ways, a strong reflection of the New York downtown music sceene-- indeed, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, drummer Susie Ibarra, and laptop electronics performer Ikue Mori are all associated with the downtown scene and John Zorn's extended family. But as a trio, they largely aoid the sort of cliches of the scene-- there's no rampant, free-wheeling improv on this record, nor do the usual personalities of sound come forth.



Instead, what this album is is a delicate, almost minimalist portrait-- Courvoisier plays light-touched lines, avoiding any heavy-handedness (and from aural evidence, occasionally opening the piano up) or any extended statements. Ibarra counters this by eschewing the usual timekeeping or even implied beat in favor of color-- doubling Courvoisier's lines, or fitting in between, or occasionally playing pure highlights around it. On top of all this, Mori's sonic wizardry floats, keeping the whole thing together while never quite making it into the foreground (and yet gathering your attention all the same).



I don't have their first album, so I can't really contrast the two of them-- to discuss the pieces on here doesn't really make sense-- suffice to say the music flows rather organically but that nothing really stands unique from the rest, this is an album statement (or perhaps better still, a sonic statement) rather than anything else. This music transcends genre-- to call it jazz is a bit unfair and limiting, it sounds to have a heavy debt towards improvisation, but improv doesn't make jazz. It is what it is.



Something stops me from considering this a 5-star piece, but its quite a good recording. If you can approach it with few preconceived notions, I suspect you'll enjoy it. If you need your music to have a strong reference point, this isn't for you."