The sound of Joe Morris’ electric guitar, with distortion pedal set on stun and wah-wah pedal fully engaged, colliding with Jamie Saft’s droning, microtonal organ and Mike Pride’s thunderous free drumming approach to the kit creates a mind-numbing maelstrom on The Spanish Donkey‘s RAOUL, the improvising trio’s debut on RareNoise.
A follow-up to XYX, their 2011 released on Northern Spy Records, the album consists of three throbbing tracks — the brutal 32-minute title track RAOUL, the 22-minute Behavioral Sink and 16-minute Echoplex piano feature Dragon Fly Jones — that showcase The Spanish Donkey’s remarkable group-think as well as the individual player’s uncanny intuition on their respective instruments.
More intensely cathartic, startlingly original and compelling than anything you’ve ever heard — think of it as the child of John Coltrane’s Interstellar Space and Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music — RAOUL stands as a hellacious manifesto by one of the most formidable improvising trios around today.