While Grubbs and Gustafsson's first album, Apertura, opened up with 30 minutes of sustained tone without even the sound of Gustafsson taking a breath, their second album, Off-Road, opens up with a barrage of saxophone blasts. No circular breathing here; with the force at which Gustafsson is playing, you can hear him fill his lungs and blow just as loudly as you can hear the tones coming out of the instrument. With those opening blurts, it's already apparent this album will be different from the drab improvised drones of their first collaboration.
The emphasis of Off-Road is not the pure, bellowing drone, but rather on cut-and-paste digital manipulation. Considering how essential circular breathing and the absence of breath sounds was to Apertura, in contrast on "Dystopian Turboprop" only the breath sounds are used. Take an improvisation, remove all the actual tones and only take the breath sounds, then match those with a house-rumbling bass and assorted glitched-up samples. Shake it all up, and you've got a dense click-track to side-step between the left and right channels, filling the headphone space.
While "Dystopian Turboprop" is more playful than what I was expecting from Grubbs and Gustafsson, "Back-Off" is just completely insane and unexpected, a cut-and-paste pastiche similar to Plunderphonics or Negativland. The heart of this song is creating a duet between an opera singer and a meowing kitty cat. Assorted noises are interjected to disrupt the whole thing and make it just a little bit more insane than it already was.
This album also has a few bits of guitarwork from Grubbs (on Apertura Grubbs only played harmonium). "Pumpkin Creek" takes samples of a Grubbs guitar piece and backs it with assorted metallic racket to create a jittery meditation.
Droning saxophone still makes its way on to parts of the album though, and here there is much more to accompany it than on the fully improvised Apertura. Those album-opening blurts of "Rendezvous Up North" eventually clear space for a ten minute swell. Train track clackedy-clack fills the space, and there is minimal interplay from another saxophone (or possibly Gustafsson playing two parts at once).
Fans of Grubbs who found Apertura to be a bore shouldn't be scared away from Off-Road. As the chair-throwing cover art implies, there is a lot more sonic mischief on this release than you're probably expecting.
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