Paris Transatlantic review by Jason Bivins

Boris Hauf Sextet – NEXT DELUSION (CF 238)
The bewildering pace and high batting average of Clean Feed continues, and this latest batch brings together a range of improvisational approaches, scenes, and meetings. Boris Hauf is probably still best known as a participant in the Vienna improvising scene of the turn of the millennium, a saxophonist as comfortable in electronically rich environments (like Efzeg) as in micro-improvising. This new sextet music – with Hauf on tenor and soprano, Keefe Jackson on tenor and contrabass clarinet, Jason Stein on bass clarinet, and Frank Rosaly, Steven Hess, and Michael Hartman on drums (Hess also adds electronics) – is a rich amalgam of the two approaches. Next Delusion often sounds as if something of the woody intensity of Gebhard Ullman’s clarinet trio (at least their methodology if not their instrumentation) meets with a percussion sound midway between the spare beats of Martin Brandlmayr and a kind of Paul Lovens bustle. The opening “Gregory Grant Machine” is terrific, moving between sections of Polwechsel’s flinty sparseness and solemn moving chords from low woodwinds, continually dipping in and out of silence. It’s an approach that Hauf favors for this instrumentation, and he uses it even more effectively on “Eighteen Ghost Roads,” whose slow sectional chords rise patiently and deliberately to a stately, ROVA-esque feel before erupting in a threeway percussive rumble that sets up a different context for the same horn movement. There’s plenty of variation on the record, lest you think there are simply different settings for this general approach. Each tune features great attention to tonal / timbral contrast, often pitting high whining feedback against eructations from the lower horns. A burble of reed popping sets the course on “Fame & Riches,” which morphs via woven tones and the gentlest, deftest cymbal work into a sustained hum of an atmosphere. And the closing “Wayward Lanes” races along with a skirling series of bass clarinet patterns wending through a thicket of rimshots. It’s a compelling record, a consistent study of contain tension and contrasts.
http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/monthly2012/06jun_text.html#4

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