Jamie Saft’s, Joe Morris’ and Balázs Pándi’s artistic relationship has been steadily developing on RareNoise since late 2012.
Saft and Pándi both played on Metallic Taste Of Blood; all three played with Wadada Leo Smith on Red Hill;
Saft and Morris both played in Plymouth (with Mary Halvorson, Chris Lightcap and Gerald Cleaver) and The Spanish Donkey (with Mike Pride).
At the time of their debut release, Black Aces, we said
“With an audacious, uncompromising spirit, Slobber Pup wails with impunity on its savagely fierce, purely improvised self-titled debut on RareNoise Records.”
Now Slobber Pup are back with their sophomore release, titled Pole Axe. The original core lineup is here augmented by the presence of Swedish sax titan Mats-Olof Gustafsson (already present on Cuts and Cuts Of Guilt, Cuts Deeper), replacing Trevor Dunn.
Recorded December 2013 in Jamie Saft’s Potterville International Sound studio in the beautiful Catskills mountains, Pole Axe leverages the afore-mentioned chemistry and the tumultuous, monolithic yet psychedelic vigor of Mats Gustafsson’s reeds, yielding three boundless free-form excursions .
This journey, which starts with the torrential Pole Of Combustible Memory, continues with the equally extended Bring Me My Desire And Arrows To Shoot (a title inspired by William Blake) and concludes with Incendiary Axe, is a chiaroscuro stream of consciousness that might have been burned on 35mm analog reel.
Visions relentlessly follow visions, temperature and texture changes flow into another without hardly rest.
