'Micro-Nap' by Walking Cliché Sextet
Bassist SeaJun Kwon displays his sense of humor in the name of his ensemble, Walking Cliché Sextet (derived from a line of Nicholas Cage's character in Adaptation). And the name of the group's second long-player, Micro-Nap, may seem at first similarly rooted in hilarity, but within its seven tracks Kwon and his mates sonically explore heady concepts of consciousness, dream states, emotional frustration and the attraction to nothingness as symbolized by noise.
Those themes and their inherent tensions come to life by way of pieces that straddle boundaries—it can be difficult to ascertain when Kwon and his fellows are adhering to compositional charts or extemporizing. The way the bandleader and his two saxophonists, pianist, drummer and trumpeter/tuba player finesse those demarcations often as not come off as kinds of free jazz-meets-modern classical parallels to grunge. Tensions in timbre and volume contract and expand throughout a piece, though also sometimes working up to climaxes that ebb to near desiccation.
One might wish for a bit more of the jesting spirit informing the sixsome's handle to reside at least a bit more in the tunes they proffer, but for the music inspired by fairly profound thinking that may inspire listeners to engage in the same sort of cogitation, Micro-Nap is an album not to sleep on (for very long, anyway).
