RE:BUILD
Slide Action
NMC Recordings: CD D289

It’s surprising to learn that despite being formed in 2018 this is the debut CD release of the award-winning trombone quartet of Benny Vernon, Jamie Tweed, Huw Evans and Josh Cirtina. 

Whatever the reasons for Slide Action, it has been well worth the wait. Few debut releases have been created with such an innate sense of inventive musical thinking.  

The arc of composition extends from 17th century baroque Purcell to 21st century game graphic notation; the nine newly recorded works (three acting as internal connections between ideas) reaching in inspiration like tendrils of spirogyra into jazz, folk, DJ sample tracks, synthesiser modulations and cartoon animal sounds.

However, despite the almost subversive, mischievous quality of the musical intellect at work, ‘RE:BUILD’ displays its obvious cleverness with such ease that the listener is drawn into its fertile substance rather than excluded by its various esoteric concepts.

Liquid distortion

It starts with the Purcell’s famous funeral music which quickly submerges into a tunnel of liquid distortion, emerging into Ryan Latimer’s deliciously parasitic ‘C, Exigua’  that suckles on the tongue of its host, drawing off its musical nutrients with a joyful, amiable succour.

Jamie Tweed's ‘Smooth Place, Cool Drink’ also draws life from its host, like a slightly inebriated old soak sipping a whiskey sour through a straw in a show interlude

Jamie Tweed's ‘Smooth Place, Cool Drink’  also draws life from its host, like a slightly inebriated old soak sipping a whiskey sour through a straw in a show interlude; the senses modulating in microtone pitch and woozy vibrato from low hum to bee buzz fizz. 

‘Swamped’  undulates in a smooth 1940’s groove, like four dog-tired backing singers playing out the last riffs of a long sweaty jazz night, whilst Benny Veron’s ‘Interlude II – Sit’  has an unearthly quality of mystery, sub-continent flavourings and furniture joinery. 

It is beautifully atmospheric, acting as a seamless segue into Emily Hall’s serene ‘Close Palms’,  gently gliding in its building tension. 

Slam Dunk

The baroque viol beauty of Matthew Locke’s ‘Flatt Consort’,  coloured and textured with use of bucket and extended tube mutes sits in starkest contrast to the primary dayglo ‘Roobarb & Custard’ fun of Alex Paxton’s fantastical ‘Hairy Pony Estampie’. 

Matthew Locke’s ‘Flatt Consort’, coloured and textured with use of bucket and extended tube mutes sits in starkest contrast to the primary dayglo ‘Roobarb & Custard’ fun of Alex Paxton’s fantastical ‘Hairy Pony Estampie’. 

It’s a slam dunk misadventure hoot of surreal delight and visceral virtuosity. 

Joanna Ward’s freethought ‘Playing Frisbee May 2022’  rounds off a quite splendidly inspired, engineered and delivered release (the Airfix trombone cover a neat touch) with a game of emerging off the cuff ideas.

Some are simple, others complex, instructions and challenges exchanged and broken, explored and closed off as if witnessed by an onlooker hearing the fun and muffled voices on a Snape Maltings field from afar.

Iwan Fox 

To purchase:

CD and digital format
https://nmc-recordings.myshopify.com/collections/new-releases-2024/products/slide-action-re-build

https://slideaction.co.uk/rebuild-album

Play List:

1. ‘March’ from the Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, Z.860 (Henry Purcell arr. Josh Cirtina)
2. C, Exigua (Ryan Latimer)
3. INTERLUDE I – Smooth Place, Cool Drink (Jamie Tweed)
4. Swamped (Laura Jurd)
5. INTERLUDE II – Sit (Benny Vernon)
6. Close Palms (Emily Hall)
7. INTERLUDE III – Flatt Consort (Matthew Locke arr. Josh Cirtina)
8. Hairy Pony Estampie (Alex Paxton)
9. Playing Frisbee May 2022 (Joanna Ward)