The Quiet Temple: The Quiet Temple review – Dig the audacious grooves

The group/album title is a dead giveaway: jazz trumpet player Donald Byrd’s track, Quiet Temple, is regarded as a high point in an impressive career, but what really surprises here is the way The Quiet Temple’s core musicians (Rich Machin and Duke Garwood) tie the tendrils of their influences together to form a cluster of styles that separately might not work.

Machin has described the music as “experimental cosmic-psyche-jazz-Krautrock-post-punk-dub”, and he’s right, but if you add in the fact that all six lengthy, immersive tracks were recorded live then an even clearer picture emerges.

Indebted in many respects to jazz (Larry Young’s 1975 psychedelic-freakout, Lawrence of Newark) and ambient (Aphex Twin’s 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Volume II) as to avant-pop (notably Roxy Music’s spooky, hypnotic The Bogus Man, from their 1973 album, For Your Pleasure), the music here is heightened by some audacious grooves that are blatantly referenced by the track titles.

The likes of Utopia & Visions, Shades of Gemini, The Bible Black, and The Last Opium Den (on Earth) shackle, entrap, seduce, and then whack you over the head. Dive in. Dive deep.