Transmission begins with “Sun Ooze,” a title that turns light into something viscous. The track does not rise cleanly like sunrise; it seeps into the room through hand percussion, bass, saxophone and small ringing objects, gradually making the air feel warmer and less dependable. DJINN’s second full-length keeps the free and cosmic jazz foundation of the 2019 debut, but the playing is more spacious, more confidently arranged and more willing to let beauty remain visible before another sound bends it out of shape.
The Swedish collective still draws members from Hills and Goat, yet Transmission feels less like a side project connecting two recognizable bands than a complete musical organism. The debut established a room in which spiritual jazz, folk instruments, damaged humor and improvisation could coexist. Here the room has acquired doors. Each of the eight pieces enters a different psychic climate, from meditative drift to percussion-heavy celebration and saxophone convulsion, while the unusually clear production keeps every small object audible inside the larger ritual.
“Creator of Creation” opens one of the broadest spaces. Percussion does not merely accompany the piece; it seems to generate the environment from which the other instruments emerge. Bass and piano-like figures offer temporary ground while saxophone and voices move above them without agreeing upon a hierarchy. The title doubles the act of making, imagining a force capable of creating the creator itself. The music answers by refusing to identify an original source. Rhythm produces melody, melody reshapes rhythm, and the group becomes a circular system in which every participant seems both cause and consequence.
The title track is shorter and more suspended. Mellotron gives “Transmission” a pale, antique glow, recalling Popol Vuh without copying its devotional stillness. A transmission requires a sender, medium and receiver, but the piece leaves all three uncertain. The signal may be arriving from another person, another era or some interior region ordinary language cannot reach. DJINN does not dramatize the message with science-fiction effects. The fragile keyboard texture becomes evidence that something distant has survived the journey.
“Nights with Kurupi” brings myth into the record’s nocturnal center. Kurupi is a dangerous fertility figure from Guaraní mythology, but the band offers no folkloric explanation or musical illustration. The title functions as an unstable doorway. Percussion and winds create a humid, prowling atmosphere in which attraction and threat remain close together. DJINN repeatedly allows names from different spiritual and cultural worlds to disturb the music’s imagination without reducing them to tidy themes.
“Jaguar” is more grounded and physical. A firm bass line provides the animal’s body while saxophone moves with a smoother, elusive grace above it. The drumming interrupts any easy groove, making the track seem to stalk, pause and change direction. DJINN understands that rhythmic pleasure becomes more vivid when stability is never guaranteed. The musicians create movement strong enough to carry the listener, then loosen one bolt and let the construction sway.
That instability reaches its peak in “Urm the Mad.” The piece begins with bells, small percussion and a ceremonial hush, as though the ensemble is preparing a protected space. The protection fails. Drums accelerate, saxophone erupts and the arrangement becomes the album’s most feral passage. The title may nod toward the grotesque science-fiction world of Philippe Druillet’s Urm, but no external reference is needed to feel madness arriving through the music. Order is not replaced by random noise; it is pushed beyond its capacity to remain orderly.
The transition into “Love Divine” is especially effective. After the violence of “Urm the Mad,” voices and instruments gather with a softer devotional intensity. The track resembles Miles Davis’s electric-era density reduced to a more intimate scale, with multiple lines competing gently rather than trying to dominate. Love is divine here not because the music becomes pure or peaceful, but because separate presences continue making room for one another. The arrangement feels crowded like spring vegetation, each instrument reaching toward light without requiring the others to disappear.
“Orpheus” closes the album with another mythic name, this time attached to the musician who could move animals, stones and the dead through song. DJINN avoids a grand retelling of his descent into the underworld. The track feels more like the remaining atmosphere after such a journey, contemplative but not healed. Flute, percussion and other voices circle a quiet center. The ending does not resolve the record’s contradictions between calm and frenzy, sacred intention and comedy, European jazz memory and sounds drawn from wider musical worlds. It lets them continue resonating after the groove stops.
Rocket Recordings described Transmission through Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm and Organic Music Society, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Popol Vuh and the radical Swedish folk psychedelia of Arbete Och Fritid. Those references are useful because each treated music as a meeting place rather than a sealed genre. DJINN inherits that permission while avoiding reverence. The group’s humor, compact running time and abrupt changes prevent spiritual jazz from becoming an expensive robe worn for prestige.
The album followed the 2020 Avant De Servir cassette, which was included as a bonus download with the original limited vinyl. That detail makes Transmission feel like part of a continuous stream rather than an isolated statement. DJINN records quickly enough to preserve curiosity before it hardens into identity. The first album discovered the language, the cassette kept the channel open, and Transmission widened the signal.
The original orange-and-red swirl pressing was limited to four hundred copies, a small physical population for music concerned with communication across unknown distances. Yet the album’s real transmission is not scarcity. It occurs whenever these recordings leave one room and alter another. Their clear space allows saxophone, bass, drums, voices, mellotron, flutes and tiny percussion to retain individual bodies while participating in something nobody could create alone.
Transmission is stronger than its debut because it no longer needs to demonstrate how many worlds DJINN can enter. The musicians move among them without announcing every border crossing. A calm beginning can grow strange, a groove can become unstable, and a violent improvisation can open directly into tenderness. The album does not treat altered consciousness as escape from earthly conditions. It shows consciousness becoming more flexible through collective listening. The signal has no single message, but its movement is unmistakable: receive, transform and pass it onward.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hi.