Friends & Relatives Records

Recent review in Signal To Noise magazine of the

(D)(B)(H) / Seeded Plain & Hal Rammel split LP

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"Like the early work of fellow Midwestern experimentalists Raccoo-oo-oon, there's a calming franticness in the work of (D)(B)(H), an ever-changing group whose sound is constantly evolving. (D)(B)(H)'s "Bad For Business," captured live onto... a community radio station in Bloomington, Indiana in summer 2010, features a quartet taking the entire 21-minute A-side to sculpt a piece that rests somewhere between free jazz and non-idiomatic improv. The result is not unlike what the AACM captured in its 1966 "Little Suite" or what The Blue Denim Deals Without the Arms were doing in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the mid-to-late 1970's. (D)(B)(H) pulls it off with updated technology/anti-technology that includes Marty Belcher's anxious saxophone, Justin Clifford Rhody's peeved trumpet, Daniel Wick's small-instrument percussion, Kray Korvela's cultivated tapes, and other sounds that include guttural coaxings from metal objects and a prepared guitar which, at one point, sounds like there's a metal rod sandwiched between the strings. The flip side of this LP, limited to 300 copies, features a cooperative effort between flyover-states-based Seeded Plain (Bryan Day and Jay Kreimer) and longtime visual artist and improvisor Hal Rammel. The three musician, as documented in this March 2011 session in Grafton, Wisconsin, oftentimes come off like Rafael Toral flipping his lid (the Space Elements series specifically comes to mind), especially on the pieces "Hook and Eyespots" and "Plaster Coach." Things aren't so in-a-good-way wigged-out during the final pieces, "Grotto Instinct" and "Corner Merchants," though Seeded Plain's homemade instruments and Rammel's "amplified pallette" never let up in originality and intensity." --Steve Jansen