chris corsano / mick flower duo

The Radiant Mirror

Back in stock. Well have I been waiting for this? After quizzing the legendary drummer Mr. Chris Corsano himself at a gig early last year he assured me that an album was being prepared, and here it is, the holy grail that I've been having worryingly intense dreams about ever since. It all started in a church, I wasn't expecting much, I knew Corsano was good of course, anyone who has the Thurston Moore seal of approval has gotta be pretty darn tootin' in my opinion but nothing had prepared me for what I was about to experience. Mick Flower I knew less about, okay I had a bunch of Vibracathedral Orchestra albums but I'd never seen him jamming on a 'Japan Banjo' before - a giant unwieldy instrument fed through effects pedals and an amplifier played with fingers and bows, it could have gone either way really. As soon as the amps began to hum, however, I was converted - I was sitting in a church and having a religious experience, not bad for a self-confessed atheist, but this was the sort of music that you rarely get to see; so involving and so visceral that by the time the 40-odd minutes were up it felt like you'd been there for a fraction of the time, and all you wanted to do was to hear the whole thing all over again. Thank goodness then that this disc goes some way to translating that heart-pounding experience onto a recording; the disc is split into three 'acts' humorously labelled 'Earth', 'Wind' and 'Fire' and to hear them is to be converted to the church of Flower-Corsano. Wailing psychedelic tangled droning and plucking is set against pounding unpredicatable percussion - it's as if Hendrix picked up and left for India, bag of narcotics in tow and then bumped into Elvin Jones before recording a night-long improv session - candles burning and rituals being performed (maybe a little bit of human sacrifice?). That's how tight these recordings are, they place you in the room, they evoke real emotion and real opinion - and most of all they involve the listener. There's a danger in lumping this record in with so much of the psych/improv music filtering through the cracks at the moment, but don't be tempted to pass it off on this basis, 'The Radiant Mirror' is so much more than a scene or a sloppy genre - this is a tight record, a measured forty minutes of heady abandon and if there's any justice in the world a record that will be remembered as one of the absolute classics of the scene. Do yourself a favour and just lose yourself in it, you won't regret it..