BRIGHT FORCE
(Libra)
8/10
You know that wild, spiralling look in the eyes when a border collie suffering cabin fever is suddenly released into park or paddock? This music is the sonic equivalent, played with such ferocious intensity you’d think that Natsuki Tamura (trumpet), Alister Spence (keyboard, electronics), Satoko Fujii (piano) and Ittetsu Takemura (drums) had been locked in the band-room for a year, before being unleashed upon an unsuspecting Tokyo audience. Their sound may enter your body conventionally enough via the ears, but it rushes straight to the central nervous system, so you seem to feel it with every nerve-ending.
Call it aural electricity or sonic fire-storms, it sustains peak excitement for surprising swathes of time, and when the fury relents a creepy intensity is maintained. The piano, drums and Fender Rhodes create such density and mass as could flatten the faint-hearted, and Tamura drives through these maelstroms like his trumpet has a light-switch for high beam. Turn it up and be alarmed. Fujii and Spence have also released a duo album, Intelsat, which has more air, but no less ferocity of imagination. Bright Force plays Foundry 616, November 14.