Jugalbandi

JUGALBANDI: Greg Segal:Guitars, Hyam Sosnow:Drums

 

JUGALBANDI: A Hindi term, meaning music spontaneously created by two artists, literally, "tied together"

 

JUGALBANDI: Fasten your seatbelt....around your head......

 

Inspired and influenced by the raga and purveyors thereof, Jugalbandi began to form in the minds of Greg Segal and Hyam Sosnow in the early 1990s. The idea, the nucleus, around which Jugalbandi coalesced, was to project into the West the energy of the ancient Eastern artistry of the sitar and tabla ensemble... 

 

The Drooling Insane Beast of Creativity runs untethered, its venom coursing through the collective bloodstream of Hyam and Greg, welding together equally mind-boggling levels of compositional invention and technical skill (not to mention technical invention); Mr. Sosnow has a mind-altering command of the extensive vocabularic and textural possiblities of his instrument, my words cannot begin to do his work justice, as Mr. Segal carves other-worldly kinetic-sonic sculptures and weaves intricate kaleidoscopic orchestrations, their work ranges from the profoundly disturbing to the ethereally beautiful......

 

Their most potent musical statements (in my ever-so-humble opinion), are in the IL1s - Improvisation Level Classification System (a dissected meditation on the varying degrees of improvisation present in their work, in the form of an incrementally progressive value system -each piece being assigned a value accordingly - from IL6 being a work that is completely composed to IL1, which is completely spontaneous in its generation, with no prior discussion or planning), Level 1 -  "Gidget Goes Canine", from Yellow Star Mailing List; the Castle Bravo section of the Thermonuclear Suite, from The View is Better from the Top of the Food Chain; the title track from Night Crazy; the title track from Laydown Delivery...these vast, epic, mindmeld soundscapes are viable life-forms, they breathe, they bleed.... my wife has said this music (she's...ah...shall we say...not fond of it) sounds like it's from outer space, and I say, well....THIS MUSIC IS OUTER SPACE.

 

So, who are these guys, you ask? Greg Segal, along with his brother M. (also one hell of a drummer...OHOAD), was (is?) a founding member of Paper Bag:, a band that recorded miles of tape of very concise, concentrated improvisational pieces. This was in fact my first experience of Greg....

 

(Enter: Hyam Sosnow)

 

Hyam Sosnow, after a good piece of time on the professional circuit, pelting various parts of the U.S.A. with a prog unit known as New World Music Society, Infinite Silence (great name), Pulse, and Revolver, quit the scene in 1977, also for a good piece of time, due to the need to eat.

 

....like Godzilla rising from the sea resurrected in a cloud of nuclear radiation, the alchemist the anarchist resurfaced in 1989 to once again wreak havoc on drumming dogma and to bend minds accepting of its limited conventions. The cloud of atomic radiation was an embryonic band featuring a certain mad scientist-guitarist and (of equally mind-blowing caliber) bassist George Radai, also (formerly, at that point), of Paper Bag:.....

 

...sands shifted, elements ebbed and flowed, form mutated....the synergy that was to be realized fully in Jugalbandi furthur crystallizing, assuming the form of conjoined twins sharing a single heart......(see first paragraph, as this article takes on a circular structure....echoes of Finnegans Wake....)

 

So...what do they sound like, you ask? Imagine, if you will, bizarre genetic experiments. an insect trapped in amber. an alien's orgasm. an alien orgy. bloodletting sacrifice revelation transformation mutation. the aurora borealis. a ballet of butterflies among shafts of sunlight and flowers. the end of the world as we know it...and the beginning of the world as we do not know it... witnessing the infant's first encounter with his/her hands. a moment of complete silence.

 

Yeah, that's about what they sound like.