Flanger: Outer Space/Inner Space

The frequently explored terrain between dance music and jazz is littered with dispiriting wrecks. Some are made up of lazy appropriations of jazz dynamics in the name of sophistication; others comprise the fantasies of knob-twiddling electronic artists looking to assert their chops, with underwhelming results. Outer Space/Inner Space escapes such a fate by coasting on the spirit of Flanger's two principal architects: Burnt Friedman, a gameful player on the German dub-fusion scene, and Atom Heart, the madly prolific producer who, as Señor Coconut, made an album of salsa-derived Kraftwerk covers that was more than a novelty exercise. On Outer Space/Inner Space, the duo sticks close to a straight-jazz format, editing live recording sessions into a spacey fusion thick with saxophones, electric piano, xylophones, and the elastic frown of upright bass. The opening title track starts with a funky, Stevie Wonder-like keyboard vamp before settling into an airy rhythmic outro that slowly comes apart as it fades away. Flanger's studio edits are organic enough to pull beats out of line from the inside, revealing themselves only when drum fills mutate into figures too complex to be human. In that way, the album flirts with the deceiving off-time march of broken-beats, the newest offspring of drum-and-bass and house. But Flanger's cut-ups sound more like breezy glitch music writ large than like any forced aesthetic movement. For better and worse, the duo's cleverness serves songs that trade on goofy cocktail melodies and Latinized rhythmic simmer. A good bit of Outer Space/Inner Space owes too big a debt to the realm of '70s jazz fusion, but when it flies far out into the futuristic netherworld, Flanger makes a good case for introducing the hard drive to jazz's soft soul.