Seb Rochford/Pamelia Kurstin: Ouch Evil Slow Hop – review

As with Dan Berglund's Tonbruket, drummer/producer Seb Rochford's duo album with the legendary Pamelia Kurstin (the sometime David Byrne collaborator who plays the movement-sensing theremin, an exotic piece of early electronica) issues plenty of low-end rumbling and rugged groove-playing. The mixing desk has a dominant input: Rochford and Kurstin improvised the original music after a Brighton festival meeting and the results were edited by the gifted Rochford and Portishead's Adrian Utley. But both the main participants are visionaries, and the music pulses with unexpected interventions and exhilaratingly strange turns. Out of the opening drums melee spring whoopingly joyous instrumental cries, and at intervals a surreally splurting outburst, like King Kong blowing his nose. Thickly liquid textures tidally ebb and flow, scraped-metal sounds screech over crunching slow drums, pop-song melody-fragments are peppered with catlike yelps, sitar-like tonalities turn into rock-guitar breaks. Rochford – the Brian Eno of a personal space between rock, electronica, jazz/improv and world music – touches everything he does with exultant mystery.