(Avant-Garde Jazz) Neo - Water Resistance - 2009, MP3, 320 kbps

There's just three guys in Neo: drummer Antonio Zitarelli, tenor saxophonist Carlo Conti and guitarist Manilo Maresca, but they make a lot of joyful noise. Its start-stop-stumble speed jazz that calls to mind the vivid, condensed harmolodics of John Zorn's Spy vs Spy and the raw, thrashing energy of the Scorch Trio. Atonal but highly structured, highly composed but highly improvisational, the music of Neo is a conundrum that invites listeners to solve. And I love puzzles like these. There's no bassist, but there's no need for one: rhythm and harmony are completed integrated, making the bass's traditional role of bridging the two not needed in this case.
Water Resistance came out last year, distributed stateside by Cuneiform's Wayside imprint. There's fifteen tracks here, but nine of them run three and a half minutes or less and another four of them less than five minutes long. It's like “ultra" laundry detergent: so intense, just a small dose handles the load. “Ooh No!" shows determined concentration for all three players to play such gnarly lines in perfect unison. Many whack jazz combos might get that hyper for a tune or two, but Neo rarely lets up on the gas pedal. “Canto Di Natale" is a twenty-six second screech fest, and “Medieval Tune" sounds much like a mutated Western swing tune. “Iperprofessional" is the closest the group come to an identifiable melody in the conventional sense, one that is constructed using Ornette's principles.
The ballad of the bunch finally comes at track eight, “Come Trasformare Il Divertimento In Tragedia," a song that's played at a normal tempo, but by slowing it down, one gets to uncover the intricacies in their compositions that blow by the ears at their usual rapid pace. “Pensieri E Riflessiono Suli'Ottimismo" is a dyslectic mish mash of sounds, like a broken down hip-hop rhythm track and a sax blown as if it was from behind a fan. Occasionally, there are short individual solos like from Conti on “Silicon Valley," but the structured or group improvisation parts are usually far more complex than the solos.