Angell & Crane: Angell & Crane

Montreal-based artists Simon Angell and Tommy Crane make what they call "jazz-adjacent improvised music." Angell plays bass and guitars, along with synths. Crane crafts his sounds with drums and percussion, programming synths and a vibraphone. Mix in some vocalese by Sarah Rossy and alto sax and flute from Charlotte Greve and we have Angell & Crane, the debut album from the two leaders, culled from hours of taped sessions that have been curated, molded and pared down to an album's worth of spooky, ambient, exploratory soundscapes.

It comes across like a mix of trumpeter Arve Henriksen and sound sculptor Brian Eno in its gentle relentlessness and backdrops of ghostly exhortations. Then sometimes the music goes crunchy, like 1950s garage rock flying off on a psychotic tangent ("Honguedo") or grinding into a menacing industrial zombie music mode ("Hesa Fredrik"), before settling into a soundtrack for an especially distinctive Aurora Borealis ("Yellow Diamond").

The studio is a big part of the creation. Angell and Crane use the recording space the way that producer Teo Macero did with Miles Davis in the trumpeter's In A Silent Way (1969) and On The Corner (1972), both on Columbia Records. The result, Angell & Crane, is forty hours of freely improved music distilled into forty minutes of twenty-first-century sound sculpting, which feels like an encapsulation of new-age angst stirred in with a measure of weirdness and a palpable joy of creation mood, like an unreleased album recorded for ECM Records, now seeing the light of day.