In the typically garish language often used by critics of improvised music, Phil Freeman writes in the liner notes to Live in Allentown, a reissue of a recording from 1986, that when he first heard this album, he thought someone was being ripped limb from limb. Yay! Good times ahead!

 

There’s no question that the twin saxophones of Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and the guitar of OffBeat contributor Donald Miller are an acquired taste. Freeman’s description is a garish shorthand for a complicated sound with roots in music, not the abattoir. A few jazz strains are found in Borbetomagus, along with the blues, Hendrix, rock ’n’ roll, and every genre that has ever aspired to confront the social/economic/political mainstream. It’s not necessarily easy to hear because it’s all happening at once, and because confrontation is in the music’s DNA, it is never easy. But it’s never simply noise either.

 

The album’s two tracks require the listener to pass from the zone of curious listening to the edge of patience then into the state where the sounds become the product of a band and not individual members, where it isn’t clear if some a noise is a horn part, a guitar part, or an overtone caught on tape. If this sounds in itself perverse, George Clinton would admit that his lengthy funk workouts are built on the same movement, with the semi-trance state being the point at which people lose themselves and drift from impatience into dance.

 

I could try to separate the two tracks, but at over 20 minutes each, they’re like one day and the one after it—similar in most ways, different in the details. I still think this music is best heard in person where the sound becomes the atmosphere, but Live in Allentown is a powerful musical statement, no matter what Phil Freeman says.