LATE ASTER | MONOLITH COCKTAIL - REVIEW

MONOLITH COCKTAIL - THE PERSUAL #47

September 2023

Diaphanous throughout as they merge hints, evaporations and more heralded swirling signs of a (cornet) trumpeting Don Cherry, Miles Davis and Chat Baker with synwaves and dream pop to produce what I would call vapour-jazz, the gauzy efflux San Francisco duo of Aaron Messing and Anni Hochhalter are somewhat unique.

classically-trained in brass instrumentation, but open-ended on their embrace of the ethereal and electronica, the blossoming Late Aster duo build upon their 2021 debut EP, True And Toxic, with a relenting but emotively-pulled quartet of previously unreleased "live" audio and visual tracks. On this voyage they extend the lineup to include the guitarist Charles Mueller and Mark Yoshizumi, who not only mastered this EP but also co-produced and co-engineered it with Mueller. They also brought in another fellow San Fran creative, the artist and photographer Deadeye Press, to film the session on hi-8 tape from a handheld video recorder - each track will be accompanied by its own visual hallucination and heat sensor trip.

Recorded in a day (the 9th of June to be specific) in the Light Rail studio of the title, the resulting traversing and wrapping, enveloping mirages are near translucent in delivery. Using an apparatus of brass (the already mentioned trumpet, but I think the French Horn too), fx pedals, drum machine/sampler, the Korg Miniloge and Moog Subharmonicon polyphonic synths, and of course a free-roaming creativity, they offer a trio of original peregrinations and one transformative vision of an old standard. The latter, 'It Never Entered My Mind', is a wispy, submerged and wafted vision of Rodgers &Hart's 1940s musical plaint, covered by an assortment of stars and luminaries, from crooner Sinatra to Julie London and jazz notables like Stan Getz, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald. But this take seems to sail closet to Miles Davis' Quintet recording, a solitary romantic pine of regret. Hochhalter sings a gauzy absorbed spell that's barely there.

Songs like 'Safety Second' voyage towards the algorithms and arpeggiator of kinetic-pop and trance; a drifted Chet trumpet is present of course, but this feels less jazzy, more dreamy and cerebral. 'Play It As It Lays' sounds like the male/female duet affected ethereal sound of Hackedepiccitto in a cosmic starry embrace with Hugh Masekela, whilst 'Ripple' exists in a electronic-pop fog of Miles in Spain, near echoes of Mexico, Panda Bear and Colliery soul brass.

Effortlessly converging a removed version of the classical, jazz, dream pop and analogue- sounding electronica, Late Aster, in a live and filmed setting, produce moving music with a spacey, ethereal hazy feel. I love this EP, which bodes well for the duo's inaugural album, released sometime in 2024.