The kind of free-improv vocabulary that includes industrial noises, ambient hums, cat-and-mouse scampers and pregnant silences burst out of the late 1960s as an anti-tune guerilla movement, but has in recent years begun producing bracing tunes of its own. French drummer Sylvain Darrifourcq is a prodigious original whose repertoire has all the spiky, crackling energy of improv, but which balances spontaneity with very tight organisation. His In Bed With trio (also featuring keyboardist Kit Downes and guitarist Julien Desprez displayed the method in action in a succinct set at the Vortex.
Desprez opened the show with a remarkable – and often startlingly human and voicelike – unaccompanied set of bugged-guitar effects. He gripped the audience early on with alternations of noise (massed-motorbike throbs, metallic door-slams, drumlike rhythms) and prolonged pauses. He conjured secretively jazzy runs and squirming phrases like a lip-twisting improv singer, ending up on a swelling finale that was unexpectedly pure and choral.
In Bed With then similarly opened with dense, stop-go phrases, as if a door into the gig was being alternately opened and shut. There are sonic resemblances to Downes’ own Troyka trio but the Anglo-French group play almost entirely collectively, and avoid Troyka’s more explicit idiomatic connections. At the keys, Downes combined a textural and a deep-bass role, Desprez was both muscular and lyrical, and Darrifourcq shuffled metronomic clickings, snare-drum flurries abruptly ending in hi-hat snaps and stadium-rock cannonades.
Their opener mixed spasmodic grooves and a ferocious heavy-metal roar, a ticking-clock drum figure introducing the next piece raced to a crescendo and back, and a more songlike guitar line then gently rose and fell before a crunching groove submerged it. A mathematically-staccato rhythm stirred panpipe-like whoops from Downes’ electronics and then a trip-hoppish trance, and a fast and capricious rocker climaxed a set that had kept listeners on tenterhooks from the off.
• In Bed With play the 2015 Cheltenham jazz festival. Dates to be announced in February.
