In The Seven Dreams, the debut from Goldbug, jazz and experimental music weave themselves so closely together they don’t recognize their own limbs. Consisting of experimental guitarist/electronicist Tim Motzer, his bass-playing partner in crime Barry Meehan, British woodwinds legend Theo Travis and young gun drummer Eric Slick, the band composes and/or improvises a set of tunes that owe as much to contemporary glitch electronica as to the ECM work of Bill Frisell and David Torn. “Shadow Memory,” the record’s jazziest and most accessible cut, opens the record with atmospheric melody and buoyant rhythm. But things take a turn for the surreal, with the following tracks bleed into one another like newspaper ink in the rain, culminating in the probing “Scratching the Third Eye.” “The Past is Still Present” reflects its title with circular basslines, steady drums and guitar licks that break the surface like random thoughts of times past, before transitioning to the soothing assertion of “Persistence of a Memory.” Slick and Meehan keep the engine swinging, even as Motzer sprays e-bow moans and laptop bloops all over the windshield. Travis just seems to appear and disappear at will, with ghostly flourishes that can’t be as random as they seem. It’s hard to tell if projects like this are one-offs or the beginning of something lasting, but on the evidence of The Seven Dreams, I hope it’s the latter.
