Recommended Album: Irreversible Entanglements – ‘Protect Your Light’ – +rcmndedlisten /// New Music Highlights In Alternative Sounds

One way to visualize Irreversible Entanglements’ music is to imagine the exploding brain meme where each subsequent frame shows the human mind becoming more and more overloaded with energy until it eventually bursts to the world outside. The free jazz band featuring Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa, bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, drummer Tcheser Holmes, and saxophonist Keir Neuringer have, to date, relied on their collective intuitions to guide their sound through a boundless trajectory with only the dark history of mankind and self-introspection pulling it one way or another, and it always builds to a similar point of climax. Protect Your Light, Irreversible Entanglements’ fourth studio effort and first for iconic jazz label, Impulse! Records, is something more considered to their approach, however, because in the end, we have to be in order to do what the listen’s title tells us to so that we thrive. For that, the eight compositions throughout bend toward a semblance of structure without relinquishing their energy to anything beyond what feeds in through their instincts, as if what feeds its artisanal cacophony of imbued rhythm, crashes of realization, and pressurizing brass all ultra accentuated by Ayewa’s prose preaching out of a survivalistic self-love are more so symbiotic with the human experience on a microcosmic experience rather than inviting that of the depths of the universe and time to inform them. We’re hearing lines present themselves more visible within Irreversible Entanglements’ invincible force field, and as ever intentional, they serve to keep that live-giving burst of energy which exists in us all safe inside this time.

Highlights: “Our Land Back”, “Soundness”, “Degrees of Freedom”