Tuxedomoon

This intended side project of the legendary instrumentalist-experimentalist collective began as the soundtrack for a real film these hallucinatory and rapacious Belgian-Californian sound collectors are making based on Brion Gysin’s novel about the Paris hotel where Gysin and William Burroughs pioneered their cut-up/fold-in nonlinear writing techniques. But listeners new to Tuxedomoon’s Carnivale-esque whirl of found sounds, freighted samples, and created mythologies need not be burdened by deconstructing a heavy history. Founding member Peter Principle’s bass is as lovely and sonorous an anchor as ever, while trumpet player Luc van Lieshout and saxophonist Steve Brown have dispensed with the annoying jazz nuances of 2004’s Cabin in the Sky in favor of chamber-flavored virtuosity. Many of the twenty tracks contain the word flying, and Bardo Hotel Soundtrack suggests both weightlessness and motion; it sounds like an orchestra of seraphim, atop a towering nimbus cloud, tuning its instruments and gossiping about the humans below.