Accompanied by a like-minded troupe of intergalactic travelers, the Bitchin Bajas member brings together jazz composition with far-out electronic sound design.
Rob Frye spent much of the 2010s playing in Chicago’s Bitchin Bajas, whose goofy name belies an affinity for immersive, outward-bound music more in keeping with acid trips in cathedrals than the bratty surf punk that their handle implies. If you believe that one of music’s primary goals is to transport the listener from earthly concerns, you will find no more fuel-efficient vehicle to achieve this than Bitchin Bajas. As with the work of Terry Riley, Bitchin Bajas’ music scans as both lysergic and liturgical. At their best, they make your head feel as if it’s a sky-sized sponge for transcendent tones.
While Cooper Crain initially founded Bitchin Bajas as a solo project, Frye has proven himself a key utility player—the member who can pick up flute, guitar, sax, and synthesizer and add crucial coloration to the band’s expansive creations. (He plays a similar role in Crain’s psych-rock unit Cave.) After a decade of under-the-radar solo recordings, Exoplanet is the first relatively high-profile album under Frye’s own name, and it showcases his grounding in jazz along with his proclivities for field recording and far-flung electronic sound design. Pursuing his interest in birdsong, he has gone so far as to transcribe it, a practice utilized in two pieces here. Frye is also enamored of sounds collected by NASA, which surface in the pivotal song “Jupiter Control.”
With help from Bajas’ Crain and Dan Quinlivan (synths), Nick Ciontea (synths), Ben LaMar Gay (cornet and Wurlitzer), and Tommaso Moretti and Quin Kirchner (drums), Frye sets out to travel the spaceways, madly and dutifully. (Bitchin Bajas covered Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons at Play” on 2017’s Bajas Fresh, and Frye titled a solo LP Rafractions, to give you an idea of where he’s coming from—and where he’s going.) A woodwinds master, Frye also adds synthesized ingredients to the cauldron his mates stir up. You can hear the way they revel in experimentation on Exoplanet’s “Innercosmos,” a confusion of strange fizzing and burbling that’s akin to the beginning of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band’s “Jetsex,” but not as ominous. By contrast, “Sunset on Jgelu” offers a beatific, synth-dominated denouement.
But such rhythm-free spelunking is not Exoplanet’s only thrust. Opening track “Sunrise on Pruhina” is a spiritual-jazz fanfare that heralds a new, beneficent ritual. Its upswirl of flute, cymbal splash, muted yet ecstatic sax, and restrained drum thunder sets the album’s appropriately exploratory tenor. Similarly, “XC175020” marches purposefully into foreign territory with odd percussion tones somewhere between an unconventionally tuned xylophone and a synthesizer. Perhaps the unusual timbres derive from those aforementioned birds? It’s an avant-jazz trip that sounds simultaneously earthy and otherworldly. So is the rugged jazz peregrination “Lightship Sgr A Star,” with a synth riff that undulates and seethes mesmerizingly in the lower registers. The track comes off like a well-oiled machine that makes you feel both combat-ready and relaxed. Exoplanet abounds in such fascinating paradoxes.
The record’s most far-out track is “Jupiter Control.” Distinguished by an acidic, quasi-TB-303 chord progression and powered by militaristic beats that evoke Mani Neumeier on Zero Set, his groundbreaking 1983 album with Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank, “Jupiter Control” portends a future full of turmoil, triggering thoughts of unprecedented lifeforms. Frye created all of the synth sounds, then had Ciontea feed astronauts’ voices through his modular; finally, he blended in ionosphere emission and space weather electromagnetic pulses sampled from University of Iowa Space Audio. Frye has a long history of mesmerising listeners by means of repetition and unconventional textures. With Exoplanet, he expands his palette—and listeners’ minds.
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