Telephone Jim Jesus - "Anywhere Out of the Everything"

Telephone Jim Jesus - Birdstatic (Anticon. 2007)

Telephone Jim Jesus - Anywhere Out of the Everything / Anticon.

I hate it when my favorite blogs go on hiatus. Whether permanent (RIP Funtime OK, Spoilt Victorian Children, et al) or temporary (Us in the past two weeks), it means less to learn about. If you're only updating once a week as it is, the established precedent ensures one never gets their hopes up too high. I never had illusions about being able to review forever, but it stung a little bit that just as I was moving somebody added us on del.i.cious and said we were "the best music blog in Chicago. Period." Whoops! Somebody picked the wrong time to run into flowers.

George Chadwick has made no such blunders. With a label full of guys who seem to be releasing material every week (Tim Holland in all his various guises, Alias, Why?, and so on), Telephone Jim Jesus is a rare exception to the precedent of constant output for this esteemed label. Three years ago, A Point Too Far to Astronaut introduced Chadwick to the world as an intergalactic head-trip and there's been sparse output since. Chadwick is also an exception in another way: While Mansbestfriend hit out at the political and Odd Nosdam's Level Live Wires patched a quilt of hazy day-to-day happenings earlier this year, Telephone Jim Jesus acts as the orbital counterweight. In a room full of earthly found-sound freaks, Chadwick positions himself as Anticon.'s own Judica-Cordiglia brother.

"Did You Hear?" wastes no time in making clear the aesthetic. Disjointed electronic transmissions feed into echoing guitar strings, unencumbered by gravity or the simple melody that starts this album off. Nearly a minute in, "Are you there?" repeats in a gravelly bass and the drums crunch in. Booming analog synths provide some Spank Rock-style bass action, but it's a fleeting moment as acoustic guitars return in a much clearer way at the end of the song. You're back in space, floating around as aimless as you'd started.

"Did You Hear?" is, then, the sound of Anywhere Out of the Everything in a single song. This album ebbs and flows relying mostly on its two most dominant aesthetic features: Sprawling space synthesizers and gigantic drum sounds. Everything else, from the occasional vocal interjection to the many acoustic guitar breakdowns to the scratchy downtime of between-song static that ties it all together, Telephone Jim Jesus has grabbed the very essence of being both a lost cosmonaut and a stargazing romantic back home. In that sense, he is not unlike Air.

Speaking of, big electronic drum sounds from a discarded 80s New Wave group dominate the airy "Featherfall," appropriately titled in its featherweight melodies and brick-like percussion. Dissipating to unintelligible transmissions and a vaguely political free verse poem all topped off by Subtle member Alex Kort's electric cello. But this is another example of the unity of this album's sound; for exceptions, check out Pedestrian and Why? working words over "Dice Raw" and Bomarr throwing in two cents on "Hit By Numbers."

In fact, there are other Anticonians working on this album (Doseone and Chris Adams among them), but all succumb to Chadwick's astro-vivid focus in the end. And what an end it is: At just a hair over eight minutes, "The Castle By the Freeway" takes you as far from the solar system as you've yet been during this album. Before it launches into an almost Björk-like sonic bender, everything freezes mid-float and a vocal snippet asks the listener, "What's it like to feel?"

The answer is that, after 42 minutes, you already know: Anywhere Out of the Everything might be the sound of an outsider in the most sonically literal of senses, but like so many other masters in the Anticon. collective, it doesn't matter where they're coming from so much as where you as a lisetener wind up going. There is a big heart behind Telephone Jim Jesus, and even if it only comes out once every three years, at least it gives us the pleasure of rediscovering his music. On some abstract level that George Chadwick himself might not even understand, it also gives us the pleasure of rediscovering ourselves.