Zs "Xe"

Country: USA
Genre(s): Avant Prog
Label: Northern Spy Records
Format: CD, digital, vinyl
Release date: January 27, 2015
Tracklist: 

1. The Future Of Royalty - 2:27
2. Wolf Government - 5:59
3. Corps - 12:26
4. Weakling - 3:17
5. XE - 18:11

Line-up: 
Sam Hillmer - tenor sax
Patrick Higgins - guitar, electronics
Greg Fox - percussion

Description/Reviews: 

Xe opener “The Future of Royalty” begins with a chorus of heavily-syncopated handclaps reminiscent of Steve Reich’s 1972 piece “Clapping Music.” Then, a pulsating guitar line materializes in sheets (as gradually and as ecstatically as a Dustin Wong guitar loop) before everything progressively breaks down into a cacophony of component parts — Higgins’s dripping metal guitar riffs, Hillmer’s astringent saxophone wails, and Fox’s meditative drum fills — until, out of chaos, handclaps return, reinstating brief order. In its framing, “The Future of Royalty” graphs Xe in microcosm, both outlining its overall structure as well as sketching out its sonic limits. From here, Xe ebbs and flows through its established territory, falling in and out of conscious control yet never losing energy, ending on a single percussive sound on closing track “Xe,” just as Xe began/begins.

 Read the full review by Jackson Scott at tinymixtapes.com

Media/Samples 
Corps

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Zs "Grain"

Country: USA
Sub Genre: Avant Prog, Jazz
Label: Northern Spy
Release date: April 30, 2013
Tracklist: 

1. Grain Part One (20:50)
2. Grain Part Two (21:32)

Line-up: 
Sam Hillmer (tenor sax)
Patrick Higgins (guitar, electronics)
Greg Fox (percussion)

Description/Reviews: 

Rather than set expectations and parameters for this phase of the band by initially releasing original compositions, the trio opted instead to create a cannibalistic mixtape that feeds on the carcass of the last Zs iteration. Hillmer and Higgins used the last-gasp recordings of the previous trio to create a 21-minute continual rupture of sound, where any one layer or melody or rhythm generally lasts long enough only to reveal something else pushing through it. Fox took the same material and bent it into a strange span of beats, whirrs and drones, populating his side of this quixotic and intriguing LP with both a warped sense of time and a disobedient attention span. Those qualities, of course, trace a through line from the earliest incarnations of Zs to this rather uproarious one.

Read the full review by  Grayson Currin at pitchfork.com

Media/Samples 
Grain (Excerpt)

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