OPEN CITY - L.A. We Revise Your Neglect

From Los Angeles, Open City chase two electric guitars and one close-miked drumkit through scurrying pointillist sketches, firecracker drones, and explosive smears of colour. Members of Open City have previously played with the likes of Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Phill Niblock, and theres no denying their strong grasp of the language of higher minded improvisation. Yet their approach is undercut with a real rock sensibility, made most manifest in the barbed wire tones of the guitars. Indeed, the combination of avant theory and punk rock aethetics drops them in a similar space to Sonic Youths Goodbye 20th Century. Drummer Andrew Maxwell runs the gamut of percussive techniques, from all-out pots and pans attack through the kind of sonorous cymbal work that Eddie Prevost uses to illuminate AMMs darker paths. Twin guitarists Peter Kolovos and Doug Russell veer from Sonic Youths Moore/Ranaldo tag team wrassling to setting their guitars up as lightning rods for the liquid flow of electricity. Though the music is formless, the group are so aggressively focused that even the slightest of movements feels totally inexorable. - David Keenan; WIRE.