Each celebrated album from Binker and Moses, a duo based around Binker Golding’s free-jazz sax and Moses Boyd’s restless drumming, has had a distinctive attitude. Though they’re most at home in a crowd of fellow travellers guesting on each other’s records, Feeding the Machine, their fourth studio outing, sees them joined only by modular synth manipulator Max Luthert, who has played with them live. Boyd in particular is on form, having released his own Mercury-shortlisted album, Dark Matter, in 2020.
So while Golding still soliloquises with familiar brio, and scene linchpin Boyd ranges from susurrations to swinging breakbeats, especially on the banging Accelerometer Overdose, Luthert contributes an insistent electronic presence throughout, made up of Golding and Boyd’s output manipulated into drones, whirrs and textures.
The highlight of this approach comes on Active-Multiple-Fetish-Overlord, on which Golding’s flutters and parps are chopped and screwed into strobing abstraction, and Luthert’s low-end thrum ensures everything sounds like it is being beamed in from deep space (along with the track titles). Because Because ends this gutsy, ambience-heavy record with joyous, Middle Eastern birdlike calls from Golding, calls that appear to answer themselves, thanks to Luthert.
