We Thought We Could Do Anything is their first record together and it lives by its intrepid name. Conceived as a series of structured improvisations, it joins fiery drumming with titanic guitar abstraction for a collection of sharply focused sonic passages. It’s music with the harshest colors up front and in detail. Licht’s guitar is the torrential speech at hand, and its dynamic limits are bound only by the album’s run-time.
On improvisatory epic “18:12,” Chase teases out overtones from his snare drum and toms that interface with the flood of harmonics spilling out of Licht’s dizzying runs. The searing ambient drone piece “Irreal / Erosion” is a mind-meld employing the just intonation experiments of Chase’s solo Drums and Drones CD (Pogus, 2013) as a launching point. “Immediate Release” and “Double Rubble” are shorter studies - Licht adds his trademark twirling-screwdriver-onopen- strings technique to one of Chase’s drum-sourced electronic thunderclouds on the former, while Chase improvises with percussion over a treated field recording of a ventilation unit on the latter. Together Licht and Chase forge a collaborative language impressively non-referential, rendering genre labels obsolete. In essence, it’s free: the album’s title is taken from a book about screenwriting in the Golden Age of Hollywood, and reflects the wide open approach that these two artists take.
• Four song full-length from minimal / experimental veterans.
TRACK LISTING
1. 18:12
2. Immediate Release
3. Irreal / Erosion
4. Double Rubble