Jozef Dumoulin is a Rhodes dynamo. Drummer Teun Verbruggen?s free-jazz plus whatever else combo Othin Spake would be lost without his pitch bent keyboard. It?s not that he is constantly showing off technical wizardly, that?s left to the guitar freak outs of Mauro Pawlowski. It?s that Dumoulin holds the improvisations together, a glue that keeps Pawlowski?s wild, infrequent, but ultimately brilliant guitar insanity from overshadowing the affair and keeps Verbruggen?s accelerando from shooting the group to the moon. Dumoulin plays the middle man. The keyboard, save for a few exceptions where Dumoulin and Pawlowski swap patient/impatient roles or when the whole combo is stuck down tempo, often becomes more propulsive than the rhythm section?a driving force in its calmness and the hopefulness of its utterances. Its middle piece ?Warped Dreamer? that really makes the whole session, only the second time the group came together to perform, worth it. ?Warped Dreamer? is one of those miraculous moments that could only come about in improvisation. Verbruggen and Powlowski swirl around Dumoulin?s slow creation of a near melody?sometimes Verbruggen syncs in rhythm with him or Powlowski copies the stilted chord progression, sometimes they both shoot off frantic spurts in opposition to the piece?s obvious center. But as the tempo increases and Verbruggen takes rhythmic control, the three fall into a beautiful sync with each other. Its unfolds so excellently, and works almost too well as the climax, possibly because the rest of the session never really picks up the pace in the same way.
The downside comes in the interludes, and the slow-moving latter half. The group forays into its most experimental at its most snail-paced, sometimes creating amazing ambient pieces that seem too good to be unscripted (?The Glittering Day Doth Drain? as an exemplar) as well as issuing forth loads of interesting noises, but often times wandering too far away from the center, that fearless stumble forwards and upwards. Again, moments like ?Warped Dreamer? leave the listener wanting a continuously higher high, leaving one in the dregs of musical addiction. ?Child of Deception and Skill? is still doubtlessly the work of three brilliant musicians. The faults aren?t worth dwelling on, and I don?t have the expertise to really get at the sublimity of the strong points, of which there are many. The news that Trevor Dunn, a bassist whose resume includes Mr. Bungle and John Zorn, will be featured in Othin Spake?s upcoming 2009 slated CD should also come as fairly great news. Until you get a chance to hear that, or see them live somehow, this release will suffice quite nicely. 7/10 --
John Ganiard (9 September, 2008)
