Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht - 1998 - Hoffman Estates

 

Drag City – DC151CD  186.96MB FLAC Hoffman Estates takes the established guitar partnership of Loren Mazzacane Connors and Alan Licht and places it inside an ensemble large enough to turn their private dialogue into a shifting piece of electric architecture. The record does not simply add accompaniment to two improvising guitarists. Its guitars, brass, reeds, bass, percussion and keyboards have been assembled into a continuously changing environment where foreground and background remain unstable. At one moment Connors and Licht appear to be directing the motion; moments later they are partially hidden inside a cloud of horns, bowed tones, fuzz and low-frequency pressure. The album’s seven pieces behave like sections of one broad suite, connected less by recurring melodies than by the way density gathers, breaks apart and reforms. The opening establishes this method immediately. Guitar figures enter cautiously, with one instrument drawing out slow, wounded tones while another produces sharper, more angular interruptions. The difference between Connors and Licht remains audible without becoming a simplistic contrast between lyricism and noise. Connors’ phrases retain the bent, grieving character associated with his solo work, but their placement inside the ensemble changes their scale. A single sustained note can seem to pull the surrounding instruments toward it, creating a temporary center before the arrangement disperses again. Licht is often more disruptive, introducing clipped attacks, rough harmonics and sudden changes in texture that keep the music from settling into elegy. Jim O’Rourke’s production and additional arrangements are essential to the record’s character. The source material began with a day of improvising, but the finished album does not sound like an untouched documentary of a large group playing in one room. Instruments appear in carefully weighted combinations, and certain passages feel cut, layered or redirected to create a larger compositional flow. The approach recalls the studio construction of electric jazz without imitating its surface. Editing is not used to conceal improvisation but to reveal structures that might otherwise remain buried inside it. The resulting music feels spontaneous and deliberately shaped at the same time. The ensemble is unusually rich. Ken Vandermark’s saxophone can rise above the group with a coarse, urgent line, while Rob Mazurek’s cornet and Jeb Bishop’s trombone add flashes of brass color that range from muted shadow to open alarm. Mike Colligan’s clarinet brings a thinner, more fragile register, occasionally threading through the guitars rather than competing with them. Kevin Drumm, Rick Rizzo and O’Rourke expand the guitar field beyond the two credited leaders, making it difficult to assign every scrape, chord or electrical surge to a single performer. Darin Gray and Josh Abrams provide bass weight without reducing the music to conventional pulse, while Chad Taylor’s percussion often marks changes in pressure rather than maintaining a steady beat. This absence of fixed rhythmic authority gives the album its peculiar momentum. Passages may drift for several minutes through suspended tones, only to be pushed forward by a cluster of percussion or a sudden collective attack. The ensemble can sound like free jazz, psychedelic rock, chamber improvisation or damaged blues, yet none of those identities remains stable for long. The music repeatedly approaches recognizable form and then turns away. A heavy guitar figure may imply a riff without becoming one, while a horn line may suggest a theme only to vanish beneath distortion. Despite the size of the group, Hoffman Estates never becomes a display of constant maximum intensity. Some of its strongest moments occur when the arrangement thins and Connors’ guitar becomes visible inside the larger field. His notes arrive slowly, carrying the same exposed emotional weight found on his solo recordings, but the surrounding musicians alter their meaning. What might sound solitary elsewhere now feels like an individual voice continuing through collective turbulence. The ensemble does not protect or decorate the melody. It tests how much pressure it can withstand. Licht’s playing is equally crucial because he resists simply mirroring Connors. Their partnership works through difference and recognition. One guitarist may leave wide spaces while the other fills them with nervous motion; one may hold a note while the other roughens its edges. They rarely sound confused about where the other is headed, even when the music itself becomes chaotic. Their interaction provides a hidden framework beneath the album’s changing arrangements, a two-person conversation enlarged until it includes an entire room. The titles add another layer of oblique humor and unease. Political references, private phrases and images of threatened peace sit beside music that refuses explanatory storytelling. The title Hoffman Estates itself carries the blank familiarity of a suburban place name, suggesting planned order while the album continually dismantles orderly boundaries. Its polished administrative sound becomes an ironic container for music filled with unstable alliances, eruptions and strange forms of communal motion. The recording’s final stretch brings the album’s methods into their clearest balance. Brass and reeds rise through a dense electrical foundation, percussion opens pockets of movement, and the guitars alternate between recognizable voices and anonymous texture. Nothing resolves in the traditional sense. The ensemble simply reaches a point where its accumulated sound feels complete and then withdraws. Hoffman Estates stands apart in Connors’ catalog because it enlarges his language without diluting it. His fragile phrasing survives inside an unusually crowded setting, while Licht and O’Rourke help transform that fragility into the organizing force of a large ensemble. The result is neither a guitar-duo album with guests nor a free-jazz session led by guitarists. It is a carefully constructed collective work where blues lament, electric abrasion and ensemble improvisation continually reshape one another.