Kemaca Kinetic – ZUKUNFT
Kemaca Kinetic – ZUKUNFT
KEMACA KINETIC – ZUKUNFT [FUTURE]
Very few albums begin so convincingly and are immediately engaging. Zukunft [Future] the title piece of Kemaca Kinetic’s debut, first feels its way carefully, stumbling towards a rhythm, then you are automatically drawn in – and the band has your attention. The piece begins to pulsate. Fraying rhythmic patterns repeatedly create an undertow, as is so often the case with the music of this trio, alternating between the delicate and the insistent. The album continues in just such a concentrated and compacted way: Dapo weaves spherical guitar arcs, over which a beat reacts with increasing vehemence and speed. A melodious high-speed bass is added and transforms the piece into a groove monster – adding yet another level by sliding into quiet, tentative passages.
All of this happens within the context of jazz traditions: the Danish trio plays rock-heavy fusion jazz. It is a strand of jazz history which is currently rarely prominent in jazz developments, but here, somewhat magically, seems fresh again without being historicised. The album is called ZUKUNFT [FUTURE] and that is appropriate, because this music is both radically immediate and also ventures into new territory. It is astonishing that these highly compressed pieces always sound off-the-cuff. This works with the ballad-like track Esthernity, as well as in the almost ten-minute long 1,000 Days which rocks and brings the house down.
The intensity is mainly created by the trio aligning everything to the rhythm. The virtuoso high-speed solos of the guitarist Casper Hejlesen, unless they temporarily break out into the open, orient to the driving patterns, loops and the finest shifts that the drummer Matias Fischer and bassist (and composer) Kenneth Dahl Knudsen build together. What happens here on the drums is in no way inferior to that which Phil Collins, from the mid-1970s, played at Brand X.
Kemaca Kinetic create an incredibly intensive jazz rock that, with all its virtuosity, never sounds highbrow. That is perhaps because the ideas behind these pieces do not come from the compositions alone, but also develop out of enthusiastic improvisation. The musicians function as jazz historians who breathe new life into the combination of jazz and rock music. What one thought of as a music-historical episode of the 1970s and 1980s sounds as if it were invented yesterday: complex, played with radiant musical intelligence and still directly striking home. Electrified jazz that has an electrifying effect.
