Lina Allemano's OHRENSCHMAUS with special guest Andrea Parkins: Flip Side
Lumo Records

While she's identified as a Canadian trumpeter, Lina Allemano splits her time between Toronto and Berlin and is as incendiary a creative force in one city as the other. Her latest sees her fronting her Berlin-based trio OHRENSCHMAUS on its follow-up to 2020's debut Rats and Mice, with Allemano, Norwegian electric bassist Dan Peter Sundland, and German drummer Michael Griener joined by fellow provocateur Andrea Parkins on three of the seven tracks. Parkins, a familiar name from the New York scene who's now ensconced in Berlin, is a seamless addition and injects even more visceral energy into the group's charged attack. On Flip Side, the accordion, electronics, and object sounds she contributes to their improvs make for arresting results. The press release calls her a co-conspirator, and the label fits when the music these four generate is so envelope-pushing.

Recorded live in an old school-room in Berlin's Schöneweide neighbourhood in August 2023, Flip Side combines the improvs with three tracks written by Allemano and one co-written with Sundland. The composed pieces offer a stabilizing counterpoint to the spontaneity of the quartet performances, though they're still audacious in their own right. As a trumpeter, the leader is certainly capable of playing along conventional lines (see “Stricken,” for example), but Allemano's experimental side largely dominates in this group context. As the leader of five group projects and as someone who was recognized in DownBeat magazine's International Critics Poll in the ‘Rising Star Trumpet' category in both 2022 and 2023, she's clearly a force to be reckoned with.

Not a second's wasted establishing the album's out-there vibe. With Parkins on board, “Sidetrack” creaks and convulses into being with barely a traditional instrument identifiable as such. After generating sounds resembling wheezing industrial machinery, the leader's muted horn enters two minutes in to brand the proceedings with a recognizable timbre; the gesture hardly normalizes the performance, however, which grows ever more combustible. For nine absorbing minutes, the four claw their way through a thick jungle of electronics, horn convulsions, bass throbs, and roiling percussion. Parkins' accordion assumes a more prominent role in “Sideswipe,” though the second improv is otherwise as wild as the first and the frenetic third, “Sidespin.”

Animated by a spasmodic funk pulse and the buzz of Allemano's muted horn, “Signal” flirts with something remotely close to jazz, though a form still beyond its normal borders. In flirting with blues-ballad forms, “Heartstrings” might be the album's biggest surprise. As is the trio's nature, however, what begins as a controlled exercise gradually swells into something much more freewheeling and adventurous. In keeping with its title, “Stricken” unspools at a dirge pace when the trumpeter waxes solemnly throughout the lament. Trio heat is again stoked during “The Line,” with Allemano blowing at light-speed and Sundland and Griener generating a firestorm alongside her.

September 2024