Invitingly intricate music that manages to make the trickiest time signatures sound warm and appealing. It’s seriously made music that is seriously fun to hear.

— San Diego Union Tribune

The rhythms on this album are just crazy... But it’s not just a forest of time signatures. What’s really brain-warping are the polyrhythms... The opening ‘deprong mori’ is almost enough to give you motion sickness—catchy and yet impenetrable, a spinny ride that keeps swerving at the wrong time... And there are solos—passionate, swinging solos that cut across the time lines, like jazzy braille darting through an other-dimensional sighted world.

— Memory Select: Avant Jazz Radio

Kronomorfic synthesizes the ancient to the future—utilizing very complex rhythmic strategies as the unifier... Borgo seems to have absorbed the history of modern saxophone into his c.V.... [pellegrin’s] fluid command of the trap-set is similar to jack dejohnette’s maddeningly casual sleight-of-hand... Barrett is a gifted soloist who answers the question of what toots thielemans might have sounded like if he has apprenticed in the art ensemble of chicago... [hubbard’s] marimba work is intricate and spell-binding, and his occasional solos are creative gems... [weller’s] got a huge, woody sound... Performing the often staggered, loping vamps that lash the interlocking poly-meters together... Garrison conjures up electronic clouds of voodoo that hover in the background... Special guest jeff kaiser contributes a searing trumpet solo that hones ‘jeannot’s knife’ to an even sharper edge... Despite the inherent complexity of the music on this release, all of the layered polymetric claves and interlocking melodies are performed so seamlessly that the listener is left only to ponder the incredible beauty on micro temporal infundibula. Highly recommended.

— All About Jazz

Some music sneaks up on you... This is a kind of jazz that grooves as it also provides some quite sophisticated musical fare. There are african influences and much else besides. Kronomorfic is a total pleasure for those with ears hungry for something beyond the ordinary. There are metrical grooves, highly interesting voicings for the ensemble, interestingly atypical melodies, contrapuntal ensemble densities that keep interest levels high, and some very worthy improvisations, especially from David Borgo.

— Gapplegate Review

Forward thinking, cutting edge yet wildly accessible ... an impressionistic journey that cuts through tradition ... a journey to a new land of rhythm and groove ... an organic deconstruction of lyrical time and space ... at times stunning!

— Bop-N-Jazz

Music that engages both brain and viscera -- even though locating the "one" can be a harder mission than finding a parking space on Black Friday ... A dizzying vortex fed by the currents of 9 vs. 13 beats coalesce in "Cellar Door," which boasts liquid solos from Sprague and Borgo ... Pellegrin's drums straddle the divide between ethnic and orchestral percussion with a level of excitement that is hard to describe ... In all, it’s challenging but rewarding music.

— NBC San Diego

You get five songs with times changing faster than a transcontinental flight... Even if you don’t know the difference between a 5/4 rhythm and a Louisiana two step, you’ll find this collection of sophisticated ideas pleasing to the senses of time and space”

— Jazz Weekly

These compositions are complex, unorthodox, and unpredictable. And yet, they manage to retain strong melodies and a pure sense of direction ... The playing is precise and impeccable while sounding spontaneous and inspired.

— Baby Sue

Strangely alluring music, where melodic fragments flourish in the soil of odd meters and cross-currents of rhythms. This is music that seems like it should keep people out of reach, but it’s so terrifically compelling that it makes friends with great ease... This is like a late-sixties Inside/Out construction, but where the traditional “Inside” is replaced by more Out, but which is massively tuneful and, ironically, presents an “In” structure, albeit an unconventional one, for the improvisations to flourish. Fans of Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill and (later-period) Bobby Hutcherson will enjoy this as much as fans of modern acts like Jason Adasiewicz’s Sun Rooms. Highly Recommended.

— Wondering Sound

Complex but gripping constructions. At the same the music is accessible and moving. The playing is excellent and engaging. They truly master the complexity of the compositions and turn it into captivating and vivid music.

— Vital Weekly

A sonic adventure... “wide-open” in their exploration, with lots of nice build and regress going on throughout...I give David, Paul & the rest of their crew a MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, particularly for listeners who want some “different” in the mix.

— Improvijazzation Nation

The band experiments in polymetric time signatures, which is multiple time signatures played at the same time. Despite that heady description, this isn't too difficult to listen to. Sure, it takes a few listens to really get what's going on, but the band is aware of the ability to enjoy a piece as well as to understand it on a theoretical level. Pellegrin's work on the drums seems to tie it all together, at times seeming to do really odd things, only to turn it around to become an integral part of the rhythm being constructed... Worth checking out for someone who likes to think while listening to jazz.

— Earshot

There are times when the cycling of motives sounds vaguely Braxtonian, or even a bit related to Tim Berne in his latest Snakeoil phase, but otherwise this is intricate, original avant jazz that thrives on complex forms of swinging polymetric composed freedom... In short Entangled is in every way a winner.

— Gapplegate Music Review

Great sounds for contemplating either your navel or the universe, these are sounds that put the tea in the tea pad

— Midwest Record

Liner Notes for Microtemporal Infundibula

Any detailed description of this phenomenon would baffle the layman, but any comprehensible explanation would insult an expert. – Kurt Vonnegut

We live our lives in time, but we experience our life across time, as a dynamic and complex overlay of temporal narratives that shape meaning. Folklore, history and culture all saturate space with time, and our personal evolving time-place nexus helps us to make sense of the multiple contexts we embody and experience.

One of music’s most laudable qualities may be its ability to bring us fully into the present, but it does this via its own complex layering of sound, space and time. Infundibula comes from the Latin word for funnel, and it is used to describe, among other things, a variety of funnel-like structures in the lungs, heart, kidneys, ovaries and brain. Kurt Vonnegut adopted the term in his novel The Sirens of Titan to describe a kind of wormhole through time and space "where all the different kinds of truths fit together."

Kronomorfic is a collaborative effort to explore layers of musical time that coexist and interweave in ever more complex interrelationships. The compositions are mostly structured using hybrid rhythmic phrases in polymetric time (e.g., 5/3/4, 7/5/3, 6/7/9, 8/12/15). These hybrid phrases provide the clavé (or “key”) from which the melodic counterpoint, rhythmic modulation and improvisations emerge. For us, Micro Temporal Infundibula are intermediary time strata within these clavés that allow disparate and seemingly conflicting rhythms to communicate with one another.

Deprong Mori was named for a species of bat in Venezuela (the “piercing devil”) believed to be able to penetrate solid objects. Technically the song alternates sections with meters of 10, 9 and 13 beats, but these shifts can be heard as different perceptual facets of a sonic prism that is formed by a single interlocking ostinato. Tehuantepec, the Isthmus that represents the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, may evoke the marimba melodies from that region, but here they take on an entirely new character in a 10-beat meter. The loping drum and bass patterns of Perambulate create a 3-against-4 feel that underlies the tune’s polychordal harmony and outward-bound solos. Dendochrone Currents, an elliptical reference to the science of tree ring dating, starts with a meditative guitar intro and then establishes a polymeter of 12/15/8 (with the marimba, horns, and bass respectively) before launching into solos over a 6-against-9 feel (with an implied stratum of 4). Gnomon, named for the part of the sundial that casts a shadow, starts with a collective free improvisation that leads into alternating sections of 12 and 9 beats. The soloing is over a heated Balkan-inspired feel that alternates 2-3-2-2-2-3-2-3-2-3 with 2-3-2-2-3-3-3.

Repolarization combines a vibes part in 7, a horn melody in 6, and a bass line in 9. The “polarity” of the title refers to the way in which the horns and vibes synchronize only at the beginning of their phrases in the A sections and only at the end of their phrases in the B sections. Jeannot’s Knife, a French parable about a knife whose blade and handle has been replaced 15 times, raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The reference here is both to the way in which the composition unfolded—with an initial rhythmic structure generating a melody that, in turn, implied a different rhythmic structure—and to how the horns and vibes create their melodic phrases anew each time by selecting pitches from a pre-given hexachord. Rhythmically, the vibes and horns phrase in 7-against-5 (heard in the hi-hat), while the bowed bass plays a repeating 7-beat phrase across the meter of 5. The hand drumming cycles with two iterations of the bass line and can be counted 3-3-3-5. The trumpet-with-live-electronics solo by special guest Jeff Kaiser seems to push the paradox of the title even further, as the notion of “component parts” gives way to a feeling of hybridity and distributed agency.

Autopoiesis, or “self-creation,” refers to any system that regenerates itself, acting as both producer and product. It offers a compelling metaphor for the way in which the rhythms of these complex clavés often seem to generate one another. Two clavés are used in this tune: 3/4/5/ and 3/5/7. The bass plays in 5 throughout, while the horn melody modulates between 3 and 7, and the vibes between 4 and 3. Ossuary was inspired (even haunted) by a visit to the ossuary in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, a chapel with chandeliers, candelabra, chalices and a coat of arms all made from human bones. The tune starts with a clavé of 6/8/5 (in the drums, vibes and bowed bass respectively), which then alternates with a 9/8/6/ clave (in the pizzicado bass, horns, and vibes). The improvised solos happen over the “big 9” in the bass, after which the melody returns and slowly recedes as the drums, bowed bass, vibes and electric guitar all come to rest.

Liner Notes for Entangled

To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.*

Lumpen Momentum opens the album with a heady and headlong rush towards a type of energy perhaps most often found amongst the “miscreants and outcasts” that, for Marx, made up the submerged elements of society. The tune itself is written around a “prismatic” clave heard in the interlocking contrabass and vibraphone parts. The melody modulates around it, first in a meter of 11, and later in a meter of 7.

Cellar Door hinges on the angular asymmetry that exists between the contrabass and vibraphone parts, which together articulate a hybrid polymeter of 9-against-13, but on their own are not easily perceived as being in one meter or the other. The rhythmic interplay and juxtaposition becomes even more complex as the horn and guitar lines combine to produce a type of “hocketing" effect.

An improvised guitar solo plants the musical roots that grow into Rhizome. On a technical level, the modulations in this tune also involve subdivisions of 9 and 13, but, like all of Kronomorfic’s music, the whole is meant to be apprehended as a non-hierarchical multiplicity that resists dualistic modes of thought.

Three separate compositions commingle and intra-relate with solo and group improvisations to form the Entangled suite. Collectively, the themes of Phantom Limb, Transmigration, and Thought Insertion push past our conventional understandings of the boundaries and relationships between body, mind, and spirit. Musically, Phantom Limb features drums and horns modulating from 7 to 9 around the ostinato heard in the contrabass and vibraphone. The closing section features a floating guitar line in an expanded “9” count over the equivalent of 3 bars of the original phrase. Transmigration is probably the most complex—or at least the longest—rhythm on the album. It starts with a very slow 11-beat phrase broken into a 3-5-3 pattern that is heard on the floor tom and cymbal. The pulse then gets subdivided to arrive at the 9-15-9 groove over which the melody and the first set of solos takes place. The flute solo happens over a 9-beat montuno section that leads into an extended solo bass feature. The marimba-and-drum duo is in a 15-beat feel that gives way to some collectively improvised entanglement. Thought Insertion is in a “straight” 6/8 meter, but the fifth bar of each 5-bar phrase inserts a brief “tag” by superimposing a “4” feel. The groove might be somewhere between an Afro-Peruvian beat and a samba, but, in the end, it all sounds rather otherworldly. Some additional “paranormal” group improvising leads to a spirited drum-and-bass duet and a cascading finale.

Creeping Normalcy refers to how significant changes that occur gradually often go unnoticed (sometimes explained metaphorically through the boiling frog story). The first part of the tune is in a meter of 19 beats. During the second part an 18-beat meter becomes the new normal. At the very end a 21-beat marimba phrase is superimposed on it, reminding us that significant changes are always occurring around us, whether we notice them or not.

Time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.*

* Karan Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

In addition to Borgo and Pellegrin, the group has featured a host of extraordinary musicians, including: Bill Barrett on chromatic harmonica, Michael Dessen on trombone, John Fumo on trumpet and flugelhorn, Emily Hay on flute, Ben Schachter on tenor saxophone, Peter Sprague on guitar, Brad Dutz and Anthony Smith on mallet instruments, Mark Dresser, Andy Zacharias, and Danny Weller on contrabass, and Paul “Junior” Garrison on electric guitar and effects.