Mag Mell by Tim Flood Quartet

"Blowing many minds is "Mag Mell", an uncanny mini-album from the Tim Flood Quartet on Null Records. Flood plays bass and acts as a producer/arranger for these 7 short studies on the darker parts of spiritual jazz. Sounding like "Meditations" or "Ascension" style Coltrane on a serious death trip, cloaked in delay and a teeth-gritting look inward, Andrew Bishop plays horns (and some sick doomsday flute on the last track), Gerald Cleaver does the drums and Jacob Sacks plays piano that gets twisted into some hissing insect buzzes. The songs are mostly done in three minutes, trading the usual extended-form exploration of free jazz for a fragmented, highly edited bigger picture. The cover art (by Tom Hohmann from Mounds/USA is a Monster/Scheme) makes it look like a commune psyche record, the thing plays on 45 and there's only a couple hundred floating around. Strange and beautiful, entirely."

- Fred Thomas

Active in the improvised music underground since the 1990s, bassist, composer, and producer Tim Flood has performed or recorded with Andrew Bishop, Gerald Cleaver, Frank Lowe, Charles Moffett, Peter Kowald, Eugene Chadbourne, Jacob Sacks, Uri Caine, Matt Bauder, Roswell Rudd and many others. He has also taught courses in digital music and multimedia at The University of Michigan.

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