As an audience, sometimes we find ourselves intellectually incapable of listening to a piece of music properly, so we start a tedious process of decomposing everything we hear and then merging the tiny pieces back together, proud of our patience and wittiness. Trying to do this with The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation is akin to the arduous task of looking for an exit to an exhaustive garden maze. While this can sound intricate, things are actually quite clear, as no one will start to defragment an improvisation; close your eyes, turn the volume down, and contemplate the possibility of an afterlife. Doomjazz Future Corpses! now.

I find it particularly difficult to talk about the new wave of jazz artists/bands, especially when they insist on giving the genre all sorts of pretentious names. However, with TMFDC things seem to glide into a slightly different arena, as their music is deeply rooted in what we used to call ‘jazz’. This may be not the gloomiest record you’ve ever heard, but the band definitely knows its craft, perpetually exploiting an ambiguous low-key, implemented by the hypnotic use of saxophone. Beware though, as this jigsaw of funeral soundscapes is bound to leave you relentlessly confused and mostly empty.

Doomjazz Future Corpses! is all about patterns: patterns of feelings you get impregnated, layers of rhythmic metres, patterns of instruments, and patterns of haunting melodies that blend together as a whole, clocking in the record over an hour. It’s not easy to sit and listen through all the eight songs, each one attempting to reorganize the bass, cello, trombone, distorted guitar, and saxophone into a daunting and restless reminiscence of jazz. The deep simplicity created here appears to melt slowly, resulting not in a lugubrious piece of music, but instead a soporific piece of art. Still, TMFDC are far from being the rejected children of The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble or the vapid copy of Bohren & der Club of Gore, for as the deep drones evolve, the warm and complete music lures us to a fool’s climax, revealing bits and pieces of its astonishing sensuality, and step by step abandoning scales and chords.

Doomjazz Future Corpses! is incredibly dark, very subtle, surprisingly beautiful, and inevitably gratifying if you manage not to fall asleep in the middle of the first song. Minimalist, slow, yet powerful, the music drags itself more and more into the middle of your stomach, benefiting from an immaculate production for a live record. Keeping in mind that everything that glitters might not be Bohren, this theatrical release might just hit your soft spot.

-Diana Sitaru