Trioscapes: Digital Dream Sequence

The shape of heavy jazz fusion to come

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It may be a little hard to believe that Dan Briggs doesn’t find membership of Between The Buried And Me challenging enough, but Trioscapes plainly exists to allow the bassist to delve ever further into his own eclectic tastes and push his technical abilities into realms that his day job deems a step

The key to embracing Trioscapes’ freewheeling abandon lies in acknowledging that 70s jazz fusion masters like Mahavishnu Orchestra and Weather Report often played as hard and as heavy as any metal band, albeit unrestricted by conventional song structures or metal’s established sonic traits. Digital Dream Sequence is no kind of amorphous mess, but it does prize freedom above box-ticking, the exploratory zeal of progressive rock colliding with avant-garde tendencies and jazz flair, all embellished with the squeals of Walter Fancourt’s saxophone. Briggs’s chemistry with drummer Matt Lynch underpins these scattershot crescendos, reaching an apex of groove on the Shining-esque Hysteria and disappearing into a rabbit hole on 15-minute closer The Jungle. Mindblowing stuff.

Via Metal Blade

Dom Lawson
Writer

Dom Lawson began his inauspicious career as a music journalist in 1999. He wrote for Kerrang! for seven years, before moving to Metal Hammer and Prog Magazine in 2007. His primary interests are heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee, snooker and despair. He is politically homeless and has an excellent beard.