Shabaka | News | Infotext - The Comet Is Coming: HYPER-DIMENSIONAL EXPANSION BEAM

Music by DANALOGUE, BETAMAX & KING SHABAKA
Arranged, mixed, and produced by DANALOGUE & BETAMAX

KING SHABAKA – Tenor Saxophone
DANALOGUE – Percussion, Roland SH−09, Roland Juno−60, Roland SH−101, Moog Sub Phatty
BETAMAX – Drums, Percussion, Roland TR−808, JHS Pro-Rhythm

„Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam“ ist das vierte Studioalbum von THE COMET IS COMING, dem für den britischen Mercury-Prize-nominierten Synth-Saxophon-Drum-Trio aus London, bestehend aus DANALOGUE (Dan Leavers), SHABAKA (Shabaka Hutchings) und BETAMAX (Max Hallett).

THE COMET IS COMING packen den Hörer am Genick und lassen ihn mit ihren unerbittlichen, treibenden Sounds nicht mehr los. Pitchfork schreibt: “at once eliciting thoughts of impending doom and possible hope”.

Die Zutaten: Synthesizer der 80er, Saxophon und Schlagzeug, gespickt mit Punkrock, Jazz-Blasts und Dancefloor-Trance.

Die Machart: Das Trio ging direkt aus dem Lockdown in Peter Gabriels versteckt auf dem Land gelegenes Real-World-Studio. Zusammen mit seinem langjährigen Toningenieur, Kristian Craig Robinson, begann das Trio einen viertägigen Aufnahmeprozess, angetrieben von Intuition, Können und Improvisation. Im nächsten Schritt sampelten DANALOGUE und BETAMAX die eigenen Kreationen und verwoben sie mit mikroskopischer Liebe zum Detail mit elektronischen Sounds und Beats.

Tracks wie „Pyramids“ und „Atomic Wave Dance“, durchtränkt von kühlen Synthesizer-Synkopen und SHABAKAs ikonischem Minimalismus, und sind eiskalte Knaller, wie gemacht für einen Nachtclub auf einer Raumstation. „Lucid Dreamer“ hingegen ist eine sensible Meditation, in der DANALOGUEs Ensoniq-Synthesizer humanoide Chorstimmen zaubert.

THE COMET IS COMING entstanden, als Soccer96, DANALOGUEs und BETAMAX’ Synth-Drum-Duo, bei einem Konzert die Aufmerksamkeit von Jazz-Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings erregten. SHABAKA sprang bei einer Probe auf die Bühne und die spezielle Energie zwischen den drei Musikern war geboren. „Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam“ ist der Nachfolger ihres 2019 erschienenen Albums „Trust In The Life Force of the Deep Mystery“, das von NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, The New Yorker und Washington Post gelobt wurde, und der EP „The Afterlife“. Dies ist ihr drittes Studioalbum in voller Länge.

 Some bands start out slowly and have to progress into what they truly are, searching for a musical part to play in the world. Others are born with their purpose and arrive fully formed, letting the world’s ongoing evolution bring context to what they do. The Comet Is Coming has possessed an air of inevitability almost from the word “Go”! Much like the trail-blazing name they originally lifted from a BBC Radio Workshop record, the trio has participated in a kind of Big Bang. Its immediately relentless sound demands a sense of being present in the moment yet lost within it, much like how visceral punk rock, interstellar jazz blasts, deepest dance-floor trances and real-time technological breakthroughs do.

Octavia Butler once wrote that, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” And on their third album, Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, synthesist/studio-magician Danalogue, drummer-producer/intuitionist Betamax, and saxophonist/spiritual riffologist Shabaka bring her verses to life. They burn brightly, directly and confidently, soundtracking our epoch of change in ways their contemporaries simply aren’t trying to. Like great artists throughout the recorded century, they possess, in Shabaka’s words, “a sensitivity to the zeitgeist,” channeling their sound into both a mirror to our times and a potential healing process for it. If that seems like asking a lot, The Comet Is Coming is uniquely qualified.

Because even by their own telling, that other-worldly power was almost instantaneous. Danalogue explains it with what he has dubbed “the algorithm of fate”: “A lot of the most important people that come into your life, they happen to you. Like every decision you’ve made up to that point, has led you to where you meet each other. With The Comet Is Coming, you’ve got these three disparate energies, but they’ve made all these decisions, learned everything they’ve learned in their life in order to be drawn into the same place, the same sphere. And then, it just works.”

They came together because in 2013 saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings, already a presence in London’s improvisational circles, pestered drummer Maxwell Hallett and analog synth devotee Dan Leavers to jam with their Krautrock-loving duo Soccer96, excited by the dynamics running through its minimal sound. Having been, like other Soccer96 suitors, denied entry on a few occasions, Shabaka simply jumped on-stage — to instant results. “The energy of the way he played just fit, it was special straightaway,” says Betamax. An ensuing rehearsal found Shabaka’s unmic’d saxophone matching the amplified duo’s volume surge, and while Betamax presumed a new project with a jazz musician would add “sophistication” to the lo-fi electronics, the trio’s resulting vibration was more akin to “discovering the sounds of Armageddon.” Their anthemic momentum and trajectory was undeniable—Danalogue forever enamored with his Roland SH−09 and Juno 60’s abilities to veer from soundscapes to protagonist, while Shabaka and Betamax explode ever onward—as was their shared excitement for playing together.

At an initial studio jam session, they came up with their name and established a process for how to work as a trio (which echoed how Dan and Max had worked as a duo for years). Play for many hours until you’ve removed the conscious mind, and your subconscious is guiding the music towards something honest and unaffected. Tape everything. Then meticulously post-produce it into an album of improvised compositions. In 2016, Channel The Spirits, the debut album by The Comet Is Coming, shaped from recordings made at that first studio session, garnered the group a Mercury Music Prize nomination. It also pulled them into the London Jazz© orbit, which also came as a shock. “I never thought what we were doing was jazz,” says Betamax, “until suddenly I was facing loads of questions about it.” 

Such straightforward ideas of genre were never really on Comet’s docket, or what its audience heard in it. From the get-go, one primary part of the band’s musical capacity was its trust in one another—not through verbal explanation or agreed-upon direction, but collective intuition, often separate approaches to where that intuition leads them, and an embrace of those differences. What Shabaka hears as an articulation (of “what we feel and see of our surrounding environment in a way that’s musical”), Betamax embraces as healthy confusion (“the thing you don’t understand is the thing that you’re interested in—I still don’t really understand the band”); and Danalogue recognizes as connection of ideas despite the worldlessness (“we ask people what they think the tracks are about, and they normally come up with relatively similar ideas”). This decentralized self-definition through something ineffable but broadly recognizable, brings with it an immense power, a sense of leadership without individualism.

It also helps foster change by reframing the context. Where initially, Comet’s sound could, in Danalogue’s words, lend itself to be heard as “kind of basic sci-fi, the channeling of a macro cosmic perspective”—Trust in the Life Force of the Deep Mystery and The Afterlife, their twin 2019 Impulse! releases, continuously hinted at inspiration lying outside the self—the group’s intention now is to signify transformations emanating from within. It’s fair to say that society’s current ”evolution of consciousness” (a phrase all three musicians used or hinted at in conversation) is the single most significant narrative of our time—whether that change is human, technological, or, in the case of Artificial Intelligence, some of both. And Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, the first Comet Is Coming album not to feature any spoken word vocalists, is their contribution to this transformative conversation: music for creating liminal headspaces and affecting feeling through hearing, whether that manifests as healing energy or trance-like uplift. “Given our skill-set,” says Danalogue, “the best thing we can do is bottle this up in our music.”

Expansion Beam was shaped by the new sun under which it was born. If the process was familiar—nine hours of music recorded over four days, followed by Danalogue and Betamax’s months-long editing choreography, alchemically weaving together random collisions and teased-out journeys into the Comet’s fiery quilt—the circumstances were novel. Almost a year into a lockdown during which the musicians hadn’t seen each other much less gigged together; gathered in relative seclusion at Peter Gabriel’s rural Real World Studios, a physical and sonic universe away from their London haunts (though aided by longtime engineer Kristian Craig Robinson); surrounded by a sense of a planet on fire and the feckless politics feeding the embers. “You’ve got to be sensitive to the environment, if that current of [musical] energy that attracts the intensity sphere is gonna show itself,” opines Shabaka. “I ran into that studio trying to be as sensitive to what was happening as possible.” Adds Betamax, “There was a lot of breathing exercises.”   

As the title betrays, there are no small ideas here. The desire for peak performance energy inflaming Comet since the beginning, was made stronger for not having been let loose during the pandemic. Tracks like “Pyramids,” where layers of synth and acoustic drums create a kind of stomping staccato motion underneath Shabaka’s minimalist sax line, and “Atomic Wave Dance,” on which Betamax and Shabaka run away with tempo while Danalogue underpins their intentions with emotional chords or eggs them on with synth-bass, are prime-time Comet bangers, headed straight for the dance-floor. In the “fiery riffs vs. the apocalypse” department, “Angel of Darkness” sounds like hallucinatory processional metal, an epic of roiling toms, saxophones, and synth gnarl that stares down the news-feed. Yet there are also moments of remarkably supple beauty. If “Aftermath” opens as a flirtation with John Carpenter soundtracks, the duet between Shabaka on the Japanese shakahuchi flute and Danalogue’s synths brings forth a fully-formed classic, informed by the cultural possibilities of our planet. And “Lucid Dreamer,” which features the introduction of an Ensoniq synth with a choir sound (its voicings echoing humans), is unlike anything in Comet’s catalog, emotional and more vulnerable, a counter to the group’s seemingly unrelenting, driving muscle.

If anything is radically different here, it is the overall sound of the Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, the way the largess of an old-school studio (with every piece of classic gear and Robinson’s knowledge in how to best take advantage of these toys) meets the imaginations of artists used to more limited resources. “The real forward looking thing here is Danalogue and Betamax’s production, and Daddy Kev’s mastering,” says Shabaka. “Pairing the type of music we’re playing, the exploratory and information area elements, with technology oriented towards a commercial sound. This is an album that shows a connection between different worlds.”

That last bit echoes what The Comet Is Coming have been doing from the beginning, and have, in fact, never stopped achieving in a variety of ways. The algorithm of fate has been kind to them. On Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam, they turn it back onto the listener. Wish us all luck!

06.11.22          Berlin              Pitchfork Berlin @ Metropol
08.11.22          Mannheim      Enjoy Jazz @ Alte Feuerwache
09.11.22          Erlangen         E-Werk (NUEJAZZ Festival Clubbühne)
11.11.22          Leipzig             TransCentury Update @ Conne Island
19.11.22          Hannover        Kulturzentrum Pavillon
28.03.23          Köln                 Club Volta
29.03.23          Hamburg         Übel & Gefährlich
30.03.23          Berlin              Festsaal Kreuzberg

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