Search - Zach Hill, Mick Barr :: Shred Earthship

Like Coltrane/Ali's Duets, but Electric

Zachary A. Hanson | Tallahassee, FL United States | 05/19/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Wow, how do I get the honor of being the first to review this? Having only limited exposure to Mick Barr's projects and none at all to Zach Hill's (which, trust me, will be the next musical obsession I develop), I was pretty much unprepared for the impact of this one. I knew that Barr had superhuman shred ability, but hadn't heard him do longer shred-fests like the ones on _Shredship Earth_. The pieces I heard Barr do with Orthrelm were very impressive, but somehow the fifteen-second math-shred snippets didn't deliver all the goods for me. _Shredship Earth_ more or less does.



The first thing that comes to my mind are the frantic sax/drum duets that John Coltrane and Rashied Ali did most notably on _Interstellar Space_, but also at spots on _Stellar Regions_. I love this format because it gives both musicians the opportunity to play absolutely free, with no bassist holding down the beat or the harmony and no harmony instrument like the piano or rhythm guitar to lock the player in a key. The only thing that _Shredship Earth_ doesn't have that Coltrane's album has is lyrical emotion, the only reason I don't give _Shredship Earth_ five stars. It does certainly have an overwhelmingly frantic and strange sort of overloaded emotion, also like Coltrane's albums, and I haven't heard a guitarist able to pull this off with shred as well since Buckethead came along fifteen years ago. Add this to the fact that Buckethead was only to play with one drummer this great (the late, great Tony Williams) and that he never played with a drummer this free, and you have one potent combo. Whether Barr and Hill know it or not, they have also went "out there" into the reaches of the cosmos about as successfully as Coltrane and Ali did almost forty years ago. May shredship earth fly for longer than Coltrane/Ali did (which was only about the last three years of Coltrane's life).



Play this one really loud and it will both amaze you with the musician's almost effortless facility at pulling off frenetic and strange sounds and runs and also its ability to take you to places in your mind that you may not have realized existed. Some of 'em are uncomfortable in their strangeness, but the excursions you take on this shredship will be well worth the trouble it took to get to these new frontiers."