Bloor – Drolleries

1.22.19 by Ryan Masteller

Bloor! I’m not gonna lie, that’s the exact sound I make when I spew all over the place. But this isn’t about me or the awful noises I make or the awful things that come out of my body or the awful mess I usually have to clean up afterward. This is about Bloor, an NYC trio that has, over the past few years, been honing their own set of stinking blurts and blasts while stunned audiences sit in shock … until they’re finished playing at least, then those audiences erupt into glorious applause. Pro tip: this is exactly what you want an audience to do after you’ve finished playing them some of your music.

Saxophonist Sam Weinberg (W-2) is behind Bloor, and he’s joined by guitarist Andrew Smiley (Little Women, Feast of the Epiphany) and drummer Jason Nazary (Little Women, Anteloper). Together they rip through the Bloor playbook, which here consists of ten tracks with names like “Bast,” “Defacer,” and “Liber Scivias,” all of which sound like ways to strip meat from bone. And that’s sort of what listening to Bloor feels like, like you’re heading face-first into some sort of industrial meat processor and you come out the other side with mostly bones showing. Taking cues from Arthur Blythe (to whom “Splice” is dedicated), Harry Pussy, Sonny Sharrock, and certainly the rest of the Astral Spirits roster, Bloor dismantles the ideas of traditional jazz and experimental music and repurposes bits of them for their own monstrous Frankensteinian creations. Always unnerving, never unnerved, Bloor make restlessness sound like the next frontier in philosophical composition – just how thoroughly can one band explore the rocks and crags and fissures of its potential?

Also, “Drolleries” refers to the “small creatures adorning the margins of 13th-15th century illuminated manuscripts.” That’s seems so weird and yet so appropriate somehow, like those little creatures were running around on the instruments and magically making them play with their passage.

“Edition of 150 tapes with ORANGE tape shell. Design by Jaime Zuverza.” It will NOT make you bloor or blurt or spew or whatever. Release date is January 25 on Astral Spirits. Please hurry!