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New York's duo Blues Control
(keyboardist Lea Cho and guitarist Russ Waterhouse)
mixed
garage-rock, sound effects and ambient world-music
on the all-instrumental
Blues Control (Holy Mountain, 2007).
The intro
Blues Control is a brief hyper-distorted rock jam that evokes
Summertime Blues as performed by Blue Cheer and blasted via defective loudspeakers.
Another garage rave-up is deconstructed in Frankie's Problem,
this time via gamelan-like percussion and keyboards.
The six-minute Boiled Peanuts is a jazzy and exotic tribal dance
for looped piano, percussion and guitar.
A similar warped-jazz atmosphere permeates the brief The Blue Sheep.
The guitar blabbers among droning and fluttering keyboard sounds in
the seven-minute Migration.
Hummum opens a third front with its abstract mural of
aquatic electronics and percussion.
Finally, the nine-minute No Sweat unleashes a hard-rock riff
that gets looped over and over again, wrapped around dissonant keyboards,
and ends abruptly in a percussion ensemble.
The five-song mini-album
Puff (Woodsist, 2007 - Fusetron, 2008) contains
even more disorienting pieces such as
Puff, a sonata for reverbed and looped sounds,
containing Behind the Skies.
The 12-minute Always On Time weaves in the mix also a jazzy piano and
a rocking guitar.
Minimalist repetition seems to be the new strategy of the duo.
Behind the Skies does it for seven minutes to a bluesy guitar riff
against bigger doses of background noise.
Call Collect is musique concrete that refines found sounds into
a cycle of hushed beats.
End Zone is the exception to the rule: a hendrix-ian glissando rips
apart the ambient cosmic music laid down by the keyboards.
The influence of world-music had largely disappeared.
The four-song mini-album Local Flavor (Siltbreeze, 2009) upped the ante.
Good Morning is a lively shuffle fueled by
the most vibrant guitar riff of their career, with counterpoint of relentless
boogie piano and pseudo-horns.
Rest On Water is a dreamy and spaced-out free-form jam.
The eight-minute Tangier returned to the minimalist repetition
for a percussive dance with swirling Terry Riley-ian keyboards.
For eight minutes On Through The Night sounds like a remix of
Bach's keyboard partitas, then diluted in an ocean of ambient/cosmic drones.
It then mutates abruptly into a syncopated percussive jam, which in turn
segues into a mystical guitar-driven meditation.
The four pieces constitute a compendium of everything that Blues Control does
best.
Frkwys Vol.8 (Rvng, 2011) documents a collaboration between Laraaji
and Blues Control.
The mini-album Valley Tangents (2012) is packed with clever ideas.
Their electronic hyper-fusion had become the most creative way of recasting
the prog-rock of the 1970s into the digital age.
Lea Cho's keyboards frequently steal the show.
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