EXTENDED PLAY
House Band
Aventurine
Apt, perhaps, that in the month a sensational archive recording by Damo-era Can drops (see page 94), this debut album by a similarly-minded new band from LA also ar rives. The limber, fully-improvised grooves that fill Aventurine – a type of quartz that’s the “luckiest of all cr ystals”, apparently – certainly sound infor med by deep listens to Ege Bamyasi. But there’s plenty of other stuff going on, too: disorienting tweaks echoing Teo Macero and Lee Perr y’s production aesthetics; a sort of funk-adjacent post-rock that lovers of Tortoise’s TNT will dig. House Band’s Google-unfriendly name flags up the project’s elusive spirit, and at the moment you’ll only be able to find it on streaming platfor ms. Linchpins Brian Harding and Jason Abraham Roberts used to back Daniel Johnston, and while they’re joined by shadowy session guys with Norah Jones on their CVs, it’s psychedelic energy rather than staunch virtuosity that dominates here. Aventurine’s standout jam is called I Saw House Band In Hollywood: if only that, personally speaking, were true…