OLAF RUPP - Fuzzy Logic OLAF RUPP

German guitarist Olaf Rupp combines elements of traditional flamenco (rasgueados, arpeggios, picados) with the fractured cadences of Derek Bailey, fusing them together with a blast-furnace tone recalling John Lee Hooker’s most blown-out extremes. And yet, despite decades of concerts and releases on FMP and Emanem, often with marquee-grabbing collaborators like John Zorn, Peter Brötzmann, Butch Morris, Paul Lovens and Lol Coxhill, Rupp’s music is largely unknown outside of European free improvisational circles and has, until now, never been presented on vinyl.

Over its four double LP sides, Fuzzy Logic sounds like a Guitar Solos-era Fred Frith musing on Jandek or Carlos Montoya essaying the music of Cecil Taylor, veering from unadorned yet forceful exclamations into torrents of austere, alien gestures packed with modal angst (a rarity in the capital-I Improvisation world), rewarding careful listening with previously unexplored microlandscapes of impossibly interlocked waveforms.

Regarding the album’s unique sound, Rupp writes, “Echtzeitmusik-people” — referring to the most strident non-idiomists of the Berlin improv scene — “will once again nag at all those minor chords and the indie rock fans will shake their heads in vain looking for the beat. But unrootedness is also a power, a gift, a way.”

In a way, Fuzzy Logic echoes Palilalia’s previous forays into the exquisitely fried spectrum of electric guitar exemplified by some of Bill Orcutt’s records, but more pointedly by Cyrus Pireh’s jaw-dropping explorations of speed-runs skittering through grainy distortion. But unlike Pireh, and unlike anyone else you’ll likely conjure up, Rupp’s work — despite its virtuosity — taps a primal throb dripping with eldritch and unspeakable menace that punches through the buttery intellect to throttle the brain stem, particularly at top volume, which is exactly how you should bathe in Fuzzy Logic to fully experience its torrential majesty. — Tom Carter