Home » Jazz Articles » Album Review » Speed Queen: Moments Imaginaires

Speed Queen: Moments Imaginaires

By AAJ Staff
July 11, 2002
View read count

Straddling genres can be a difficult task. It's not difficult to make great music, mind you, but it can be very difficult to find an audience for that music. sq, aka Speed Queen, is an improvising duo. But instead of drawing from clear roots in the jazz or euro scene, the duo uses sound textures more common in noise and electronic bands. Interestingly, sq doesn’t fall into many of those genre traps either. Credit Speed Queens Marc Faris and Joe Tunis for having the wits to come up with their own path.

The eight tracks are varied, not at all programmatic, yet one can make narrative associations with many. Even their titles are atypical; jazzers tend to short titles, and the laptoppers seem to prefer abbreviations. The first track here is “:thank you k for space harmonics body hearING, NG, NGNGNG:” The percussion rattles, and speeds up like a train; then there’s a switch, a shift.

In a sense this is pure music: It’s often difficult to tell which instruments are playing. John Cage would probably approve. Percussion and guitar, surely. Bowed bass? There are major shifts in dynamic range, then silences where you think the disc may have ended. Imagine Captain Beefheart’s “Kandy Korn” or “Mirror Man” horn squawks, but with no rhythm track at all.

For more information, visit Carbon Records on the web.

Personnel

Speed Queen

Album information

Title: Moments Imaginaires | Year Released: 2002 | Record Label: Carbon 7

PREVIOUS / NEXT

Delirium
< Previous

Red Clay
Next >

Support All About Jazz

All About Jazz has been a pillar of jazz since 1995, championing it as an art form and, more importantly, supporting the musicians who make it. Our enduring commitment has made "AAJ" one of the most culturally important websites of its kind, read by hundreds of thousands of fans, musicians and industry figures every month.

Go Ad Free!

To maintain our platform while developing new means to foster jazz discovery and connectivity, we need your help. You can become a sustaining member for as little as $20 and in return, we'll immediately hide those pesky ads plus provide access to future articles for a full year. This winning combination vastly improves your AAJ experience and allow us to vigorously build on the pioneering work we first started in 1995. So enjoy an ad-free AAJ experience and help us remain a positive beacon for jazz by making a donation today.