Needs!

VINYL FORMAT. Hand-numbered edition of 500 copies.

Needs! is the brand new heavyweight album from heavyweight saxman Mast Gustafsson. The studio album comes housed in the customary Dancing Wayang hand silk screened sleeve, this time featuring artwork by Austrian artist Mathias Poschl and with liner notes by Jim O'Rourke. On Needs! Gustafsson uses the studio setting to produce unexpected and surprising results, pushing his playing into unchartered territories. The LP features Mats' baritone, but also the slide saxophone (a rare antique instrument) as well as a small selection of live power electronics. He combines the acoustic sounds of his saxophones with these amplified sounds, mixing them as overdubs as well as live improvisations. The raw and muscular approach to blowing that has made Gustaffson the unbound force he has become can be experienced in its naked and most vital form on this LP. From gasping to rasping to tongue slapping, nothing smoothes over the up-close physicality of conjuring sounds from his saxophones. The brass resonates as Gustafsson's lungs whistle with tension and release. While his acoustic playing is rich in dynamics with a sense of punctuation and spaces, some of his electronic concoctions are thick slices of condensed compressed mass. "Sources of Such" manufactures a dense, immovable wall of electronic sound broken only by a deep, guttural warble of the baritone's lowest registers. On both the opening and closing tracks, Gustafsson uses the electronic devices to follow and echo his acoustic playing with organically playful results that merge and blur the lines between the acoustic and the electric sound sources. This is a record of substance and space shifting in an array of unexpected layers of noises, which interlock and split apart in equal measures.