Where's the noise? The Brand X spinoff trio Box of Noise spieled out some damn good fusion, but our earholes remained unchafed.
Casual in jeans & hoodie, Austrian guitarist Alex Machecek tingled the strings of his stockless guitar with the kind of effortless movement and rhythmic precision you'd expect from someone who has probably been absorbing the metric and harmonic challenges of Brand X since he was 2 (1974). He needed the experience to hold the stage alongside craggy original BX bassist Percy Jones and tackle some of that knotty vintage material. Jones made it easier, though, by keeping things uncluttered -- he showed himself to be the rare fusion bassist who likes to settle into a riff and ride a groove, rarely venturing up the more trebly regions of the neck.
That groove flowed naturally from the flexy wrists of the drummer with the bushy ponytail, Kenny Grohowski, who made every strange time signature breathe, even when executing tricky stop/start passages.
The band began with what felt like a spontaneous jam to warm up a drizzly evening; faint spacy loops, probably auto-generated by one of Machacek's pedals, colored the spaces. The trio raised the energy level bit by bit throughout the set, scheduling distant flyovers of Jamaica and Memphis along the way, and making counterpoints and chromatic progressions sound easy.
When Grohowski began scraping the cymbals for an extended spotlight on his basic jazz traps, we thought we might be in for some of the inventive bombast he brings to his abstract-metal band, Imperial Triumphant -- the advertised Noise, in other words. Instead we got something just as good: a percussion composition that brought out every nuance of his kit, moving from sound to sound with logic and profound feeling. Here was one drum solo that rendered the obligatory bathroom run impossible.
If Box of Noise made an overall impression of cool detachment, we didn't feel at all frozen out. Clearly a heart was beating beneath.
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TV PHOTO BY FUZZY BERG.
MAIN PAGE SCULPTURE BY JANE DECUIR.