KOMESHI TRIO “The Master Speaks Thrice” C38 (Astral Spirits)


Who is the master? If you’ve watched any number of thrillers with cults in them, the master always seems to be someone malevolent and cunning, able to pull the strings of a bunch of puppet followers to realize his nefarious dreams. If the master speaks, you listen with rapt attention. If the master speaks a second time, you listen but become infinitely more terrified. If The Master Speaks Thrice

Well.

Komeshi Trio is going to take this one for the team and find out just what happens when the master speaks that third time, what kind of hell will rain down upon his followers and/or his enemies. Maybe everyone. Everyone is probably the master’s enemy if the master has to hide in the shadows to consolidate his power until he accumulates enough to emerge and make his move. (Oh! The master in all these scenarios really comes across as Voldemort, doesn’t he?)

Komeshi Trio is Peter Kolovos on guitar, Patrick Shiroishi on saxophone, and Noel Meek on electronics and tapes. The two improvised pieces that fill one side of a tape each were recorded over the last couple years and bear the hallmarks of occult practice. “The Books of My Numberless Dreams” is a wordlessly incanted library of miasmic pestilence, a slow enveloping of the listener by dark forces that leaves one a husk once the music has done its work. Jags of each player’s instrument lash out at opportune moments and pierce the dread, adding to, yep, the dread. It’s dangerous listening to it!

“One Note for the Dervish” tricks you at first into thinking it may stretch euphoniously into hymnodic rhapsody, but that spell is broken quickly as the electronics short-circuit and set the stage for an apocalyptic showdown. This time, around 4:15 in, hints of the “Imperial March” from Star Wars hover at the periphery, and Kolovos turns his guitar menacingly toward his two improv-mates, letting it billow with menace. Shiroishi and Meek respond to the challenge, but the stage is set for the rest of the track: we’re in for an intense tug-of-war as the players battle each other for supremacy.

The Master Speaks Thrice, and war and death are among you. Or, if not war and death, then at least mild annoyance. But the soundtrack’s top notch no matter what!



--Ryan