SONAR AND DAVID TORN

VENUE THE VORTEX, LONDON DATE 02/12/2018

It’s a move of genius. ‘Minimalist progressive groovers’ Sonar have been booked for two nights into dalston jazz space The Vortex to launch their new album – which is called Vortex. it makes drummer Manuel Pasquinelli laugh shyly when he announces it onstage later, but right now it’s knowing smiles all round as their temporary fifth wheel steps up solo for tonight’s first set – guitarist, composer and producer david Torn.

To his right is a box of tricks that we can only see the back of: he manipulates this and his ronin Mirari – strumming, sliding, tapping, picking, shaking it. The music soars, glides, oscillates and loops, at some points it’s the granular texture for a flying saucer lift-off that phases into a vibrato tunnel punctuated by tonal taps.

as the sound drifts off into the cosmos Torn grins, “i’d like to title that piece Slow night in Space land.” His second improv has more of a jazz twang to it – as well as some hard reverb – albeit in orbit around us again, a space age Shadows by way of eno’s apollo recordings, with the whammy well wanged.

For set two, Sonar are up. at the opposite end to Torn, the quartet are effect-free and tightly knit. They start with Tromsø, which picks and plucks in familiar cycles that soon gets feet tapping. it’s insistent, insidious stuff that creates tension as it ticks away its 11 minutes.

Bringing Torn in for Twofold Covering, there’s an inverted Om riff afoot from Bernhard wagner, in the Swiss quartet’s style, of course. Chicken-scratch figures get some Torn texture beneath to lift them; you can see how, when he began to jam with them in the studio for “just one or two numbers” a light went on as to how to switch up Sonar’s metric gears.

From here it’s the rest of Vortex; the clanging red Shift with its unsettling psych bridge, the minimalist waves and Particles with Torn twinkling away at the edges, and Monolith’s otherworldly descent into head-nodding metallics via a kind of modular science funk-tion.

Things get heavy by Part 44, when composer/guitarist Stephan Thelen’s math, Christian Kuntner’s bass and Pasquinelli’s time collide with Torn skronk, before lookface!’s cymbalcrashed dub repetition takes the roof off.

what a launch; even the band look stunned at their own endeavours.