XT & RP Boo - 31.12.18 (2019)
This is promoted as a tribute of sorts to the musical history of Chicago. That means bits and pieces from Chicago jazz and house - and all related lineages in between and beyond - thrown together in a blender one can plausibly cook up in their dreams, with occasional islands of intensity and some semblance of meaning along non-descript moments. One moment you can picture yourself in the middle of an erotic party, and just some moments away you're lost in confusion while battered by something akin perhaps to the infamous winds of the Windy City...
As undoubtedly interesting and engaging as this collaboration is, I was misled by the reception on here - namely, "free improvisation" being used here as a genre tag along footwork - and expected a bit something else - more like a real struggle between form and formlessness (free improvisation as a tradition - a tradition which is actually more closely associated with London than with Chicago, known more for Modern Creative, which is not quite the same thing, albeit related - is a struggle for formlessness in its tendency to reject or disperse repetition as much as possible).
In fact, from the get-go, form has the upper hand here, as it sounds like RP Boo's deck controls everything or at least sets the agenda by setting the tempos, short breaths, and centering samples now and then. The XT duo may quite frequently influence the direction of the set with their input, but the triggered drum kits and the saxophone action reduced mostly to short stabs don't really enable them to assert their positions. As seemingly chaotic and unpredictable as the music may seem, most lines of flight here end up either overwhelmed or subsumed by the rhythmic straitjacket imposed by the DJ - a paradoxical way to describe what is actually one of arguably the most "free" styles in EDM, yet fairly accurate. While XT have consented to this treatment, ultimately it's striking how much power RP Boo's DJ deck holds here over the instruments - which don't really have any aura of "real" to them here - and how little room he reserves for what might be called phrasing - the longest phrases are literally the vocal samples! (Honestly, I wish these were subject to more chopping and screwing, but I guess results would then have been harder to predict.)
Therefore, it's more of a dynamic play, an exercise in rigorously controlled chaos, where RP Boo proves an impressive level of technique - one simply didn't have the technical means to mix like this in real time back in, say, the '90s. "Freedom" is not exactly a concern here, but then again this only goes to show how much human beings rely on patterns and restrictions.