Shalabi Effect, Keith Fullerton Whitman, nmperign November 25, 2005

the critique of pure reason presents:

Alien8 Recording Artists, from Montreal
Shalabi Effect

with special guests
Keith Fullerton Whitman
nmperign

Friday, 25 November
PA's Lounge
$9, 18+, 9PM doors

Shalabi Effect is free improvisation. This does not mean atonal noise, although atonality and beautiful noises are ever present; it also doesn?t mean that there is no melody, but the melodies are rarely, if ever, known ahead of time. The base sound comes from a combination of Middle Eastern modes, played by Sam Shalabi on the Oud, and the cinematic psychedelic style of Anthony Seck. Add to this concoction the experimental influence of avant-guardiste Alexandre St. Onge, as well as North Indian percussion by Will Eizlini, and you get the current core sound stew; often spiced with special guests and their influences.

The best sound of Shalabi Effect is always from the first take, when the ideas have their spontaneous freshness: any attempt to ?hard-code? an improvisation produces at best mediocre results. Attempts to actually recreate pieces always fails. At most Shalabi Effect will decide what key and mode to play in, some skeletal structure and ideas in the form of images or moods, or timing and transitions, as though they were scoring a movie. Even the more studio sounding tracks always begin with a free improvisation: any song like structure, as in On the Bowery (from Shalabi Effect?s self-titled release), was a creative layer added to the original raw improv.

Shalabi Effect was named after Sam Shalabi, but Shalabi Effect has no leader: a piece is always the construction of the ideas that come into the minds of the members and guests at the time of playing/recording. The sound is the resulting sum total of the aesthetics and communication between the musicians. Perhaps this is the significance of the name Shalabi Effect, which sounds like something drawn from an engineering text-book: [the] Shalabi Effect happens as a result of plugging all kinds of stuff together and turning the machine on to see what it does. Sometimes it?s slow and sublime, sometimes it?s scary.

Keith Fullerton Whitman has recorded and released music under a number of pseudonyms, most notably Hrvatski. Hrvatski has appeared on more compilations than you can shake a stick at and criss-crossed the globe laying down breakbeat  concret for the kids. He has worked at the Forced Exposure distribution center, written about music, lectured at Ivy League universities and is a graduate of the Berklee School of Music.  And Keith Fullerton Whitman runs a record label and mail order service.

nmperign: bhob rainey - soprano saxophone, greg kelley - trumpet
nmperign has been hailed the world over as the leading purveyors of whatever that strange thing they do is. Their palette of sounds makes laptops seem as flexible as doorbells, and their precise but wildly unpredictable improvisations would have you at the edge of your seat if you weren't so afraid of the noise you would make getting there. Fierce and fragile, lush and fractured, nmperign is tough to pin down and all the better for it.