Liner notes by Des Cowley:

I Hold the Lion’s Paw have released a new 7” single, out on the Meanjin/Brisbane label Made Now Music. Where to begin? For starters, I examine the physical object, read the words on the record label, it’s all the information I have to go on. The band line-up is listed. On Side A, Crow Strut, it’s a seven-piece ensemble. On Side B, Cockatoo Rave, it’s pared back, wafer-thin, to a duo.

Do these fluctuating line-ups – switching from a seven-piece to a duo – impact on the music? It seems like the wrong question. IHTLP, from the get-go, was envisaged as a free-floating ensemble: bifurcating, coming together, shifting between liquid and solid, changeable and adaptable, constantly morphing, with a varying roster made up of as many or few as needed, all in service to Reuben’s foundational vision for the ensemble. It needs to be said: every single IHTLP musician is a leading improvisor, bringing their own individual voice to the table, together creating an unfathomable whole greater than the sum of any parts.

I put the record on the turntable. I hit play.

Side A: Crow Strut.

A few isolated sounds come out of my speaker, a buzzing sound, drums, some rumbling sounds, deep bass drones, space-age noises, like Sun Ra, it’s all a bit off-kilter, woozy, until at 1.23 a distinct bass groove materialises, Reuben’s mute starts kicking in, foraging, scrounging, then, out of the blue, at 2.03, that kick-ass groove lands, we’re off now, horns prancing across a field of electronics, bass n’ drum, it’s almost a physical thing, primal and deep-seated, a transactional movement of body and spirit. Reuben, Cheryl, Jordan, Julius, Adam, Dave, Maria, are in perfect sync, turning somersaults, traversing the elements, synthesizing matter: density, energy, texture, sowing rhythmic seeds, fluid and mutable. The music sounds so tight, Reuben’s trumpet darting, trading licks with Cheryl and Jordan, Julius’s guitar literally singing over Maria’s metronomic pulse, till at 4.39 it all starts fading, the whoosh of wind, then twenty-seconds of silence, ending at 5.03.

Side B: Cockatoo Rave.

It’s like I’m in an echo chamber, static and electronic squall coming at me, I could be watching a science-fiction film, Stalker maybe, interplanetary particles moving through space. Then, at 0.42, Reuben’s muted trumpet, fragile as glass, enters, probing and testing the waters, even as amorphous background sounds merge and coalesce. It’s nebulous and vague, definitely Miles-Evil dark, a dense melding of electronics, bass, voices, even handclaps. At 1.51, a full-toned pulse surfaces, conjuring Tangerine Dream, circa Phaedra, you can hear everything building, swishing by. It’s weirdly meditative, inward-sounding. Reuben’s trumpet, multi-tracked, full of bravura, near-vanishes at 3.34, bleeding into the whir of electronic feed, only to re-surface, a last sun-burst. But at 4.12, the pulse takes over, percussive now, eventually easing off, winding down, fading, leaving only a staccato beat, hands slapping skin.

Okay, last thoughts. I think about what’s in the mix, what’s in the stock. There’s Miles’s Dark Magus, there’s Sun Ra, there’s Don Cherry at Café Montmartre, but most of all there’s I Hold the Lion’s Paw. Jon Hassell once subtitled his Fourth World album, recorded with Eno in 1980, as: “Possible Musics”. I like the emphasis on ‘possible’ but I like even more the plural used for ‘musics’. It’s what I hear when I listen to IHTLP. I hear multiple, the sound of musics opening up, collectively projected as a field of possibilities, never tied down to one thing. Musics that combine structure and metrics with open-ended improvisation. Musics untethered, dancing to rhythm, melody, the totality swooning with sound.

Like alchemists, IHTLP have mashed elements to invent their own improvising language. Rather than shoot for monument or edifice, theirs is an art of collage, jump-cuts, montage. Working with pint-sized bites of sound, seamlessly stitched together, IHTLP re-configure musical fragments into new combinatory shapes and forms, fabricating shape-shifting whirlpools of sound that swim in and out of focus. Once powered up, their music is a perpetual machine, like one those Tinguely motorised kinetic assemblages, made up of recycled matter, that swerve and spin to their own internal logic and rhythm, forever in motion. Crow Strut and Cockatoo Rave are shards and splinters that constitute one part of this vast continuous groove. Think of it how you will: scratches and scraps, sonic detritus, music of the spheres, it barely matters, it’s genre-defying music that’s right here right now.