Pitchfork

Germany's Tied & Tickled Trio are a jazz band, though not a trio-- they boast anywhere from six to 12 members depending on the day. I'm calling them a jazz band with no prefixes simply because they embody the senses of flight and adventurousness that characterized jazz in its various golden ages and still typifies the best of it today. Yes, their music has roots in punk and hip-hop and comes complete with a heavy slathering of fractured electronics, but it seems to me that jazz is amoebic enough to swallow all that and still retain its essence.

The band/collective is four albums into a career that's ostensibly a sideline to the Notwist, Lali Puna, and the numerous other bands that the Trio draws its members from; A.R.C. isn't quite a the group's fifth album-- though it offers plenty of material on its two discs. The audio disc consists of only the title track, a 19-minute thriller that spends its first three minutes shifting from beatific drone to funky glitch. The first saxophone enters at 3:08, cuing a journey into dark-hued exotica underpinned by a steady shuffle. This gives way to an impressive extended trombone solo by Gerhard Gschlöβl that drags the song into an abyss of heavenly drone. The rest of the piece is characterized by a mix of free interplay and steady rhythm, ultimately recapitulating to the layered horn arrangement that constitutes the head.

"A.R.C." gets a live reprise on the other disc, a DVD dominated by a December 2004 club date. The live sound on the video portion is ridiculously immaculate-- if you listen to it without watching you'd swear it was a studio session or radio date-- while the footage appears to have been shot with an assortment of drug store security cameras. The set opens with a fiery version of "The Long Tomorrow", the lead-off track from Observing Systems and for my money their best piece of music to date, and the nine-piece ensemble just digs in to the lurching groove.

The DVD also sports a bevy of bonus bits, including a German TV appearance with an unsubtitled interview and obviously pantomimed performance. The funny thing about the miming is that they don't try at all to hide it-they brought along a bass clarinetist even though there's no bass clarinet in "Tusovska Dub", the song that's playing. A couple of good live performances and three music videos round things out. Welikenicethings' video for "Revolution" is especially great, featuring a bus tour by computer generated blue creatures of a supermarket where all of the products feature images of Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi, Baader-Meinhof members, Fidel Castro, and assorted other revolutionaries. The best thing, though, is that the little critters dance to the beat throughout the video.

So A.R.C. is a pretty great package, even if it feels somewhat randomly assembled. The audio portion is dynamite ultra-modern jazz, and the live footage captures a powerful band that hits on some genuinely transcendent moments from time to time.