(Free Improvisation, Experimental, Northern Spy) [WEB] White Out & Nels Cline - Accidental Sky - 2015, FLAC (tracks), lossless

New York radical innovators White Out and transplanted Los Angeles legend Nels Cline share a long musical history, having played together for over a 15-year period. Anyone lucky enough to have caught these guys in live performance can attest to their special chemistry. They play a kind of improvised chamber music. Their tightly cohesive interplay the sonic consequence of years spent developing their highly personal electro-acoustic language. Any attempt to assign a label to their collective sound falls short. Reductionist classifications like Free Jazz, Prog, and Experimental, although all applicable, fail to convey the full depths of their jams. The music they make together is as eclectic as the venues they have performed in are diverse: A jazz dungeon in Paris, an artist squat in Geneva, the All Tomorrow Parties Festival in the UK, an improvisers’ compound in Marseilles, or indie rock enclaves in Los Angeles, London, and New York. Accidental Sky represents their first official release, and their first attempt at recording in a studio together. The album does not disappoint.
Accidental Sky runs the full gamut of artistic expression. Some of the more tempestuous tracks like the album’s epoch opener “Imperative,” the laconic “Ragged Mist of Stalled Horizons,” or the jagged “Sirius Is Missing,” range in dynamic structure from deliberate calm to unbridled fury. While other selections are more abstruse, such as the mysterious “Exaltation By Proxy” and the noirish “Under A Void Moon,” which feature haunting themes, sinuous flute lines, and otherworldly vocals. “Winter Light” stands as a kind of sparse tone poem, driven by long reverberating bell sounds. There is even a euphonious ballad in the form of the album’s closer “Soft, Nameless, Absolute.”
Accidental Sky casts White Out in a different light than any of their other previous releases, which feature the likes of Thurston Moore, Jim O’Rourke, and William Winant. As with all their musical pairings, they are able to entirely transform their sound to accommodate their guest collaborator while simultaneously retaining their own strong creative identity.
This album is a long time coming, and the documentation of these artists recording together is cause for celebration. With the release of Accidental Sky, the world at large can finally join White Out and Nels Cline on their eternal quest to explore the infinite possibilities of sound, rhythm, and space.
Regardless of whoever is sitting in with multi-instrumentalists Lin Culbertson and Tom Surgal, the White Out modus operandi remains the same: daft, improvisatory pieces that spread like runaway kudzu or sputter like an overheated Datsun, often within a single song. The NYC-based duo have collaborated with Jim O’Rourke, Thurston Moore, and William Winant among others over the years, but Accidental Sky marks their first outing with Nels Cline, the inventive avant-garde guitarist who has been a member of Wilco since 2004. The result is the band’s most abbreviated LP-sized outing, clocking in at a 38-minute length so economical that the record seems to conclude almost before it’s even begun.
Given Accidental Sky’s pointedly terrestrial vibe, this brevity proves instructive. Surgal, Culbertson, and Cline aren’t hot-wiring and joyriding across the skies in an interstellar jalopy here; they’re locked outside the hangar, desperately MacGyvering some means—any means—of ingress. By his lonesome, in combos, or with Wilco, Cline is an inventive, expressive player, but his communions with White Out tend toward the quarrelous and cerebral.
Sky is at its best when it runs the risk of suffocation. "Imperative" opens as a hashed blues, then quickly descends into a dark brew of mini-riffs, topsy-turvy synth jags, and savage little drum rolls. Flutes flutters through "Under a Void Moon" besieged by clawed noise, distended guitar, and Dada-esque utterances. At moments, White Out can sound as lost in the weeds as some listeners may feel: Culbertson’s zig-zagged wails and the pair’s bells, whistles, and effects congeal into an unstable nucleus around which guests revolve, wildly.
What’s most frustrating isn’t ultimately that Sky doesn’t make it beyond the stratosphere, but that some of these songs should go on longer; they need more space to stretch, breathe, expand into stranger, deeper realms. The album winds down with "Soft Nameless Absolute", where contemplative Cline chords are buried beneath several strains of jittery, mirroring synthesizers. There’s a generous, sunburst grandiosity to the song, which is so coherent that it seems to have wandered in from an album by a different band. Given the tendency to self-edit and considering how Cline’s guitar elbows gracefully out of the fray and "Absolute" drifts to a measured close all suggests that, artistically, White Out may be nearing the end of a well-trod path. - Raymond Cummings, pitchfork.com

Tom Surgal, Lin Culbertson, Nels Cline