Fontanelle: Fontanelle CD

Fontanelle, a Portland, Oregon, quartet which includes orphaned Jessamine offspring Andy Brown and Rex Ritter, paint a bipolar musical landscape that is both soothing and sardonically ominous in a "guilty pleasure" kind of way. One of the more fleshier/organic releases from Kranky to date, the quartet's approach to electrified jazz and low-fat funk disallow the listener the ability to concretely quantify a beat. The drums skew, keyboards gurgle and the guitar haunts - all in a saturated form of bliss. Recorded on their own, at their own Magnetic Park studios, the band would track onto their 16-track Ampex MM1200, and then mix into and edit from E-Magic's Logic Audio Platinum or Sonic Foundry 's Sound Forge. They pulled off some skillful edits and captured the best of their performances while also creating something new - much in the way Teo Macero spliced up Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. (Kranky, PO Box 578743, Chicago, IL 60657 www.kranky.net)