December 08, 2001

The Confrontation jam is only a few minutes of Confrontation territory before a few minutes of shreddy I-Man territory. Not particularly interesting. The jam out of I-Man is considerably more interesting. It emerges from the “middle” jam (the middle section isn’t played) and takes on a tense, haunting quality before smoothly settling down into Aceetobee territory. The middle jam in Aceetobee is fine, but the main jam is great—it sounds like a forebear of the great spacey 03 versions. The Very Moon is played standalone, and both jams are short and uninteresting. Sister Judy’s gets a teensy bit experimental, but only briefly. Reactor didn’t look like much based on the time stamps, but the jam was neat. Kind of like a major-mode Reactor jam, it seems to build to a Reactor peak briefly before shifting to the Confrontation ending.

Pilin’ is standard. Crickets has a short and shreddy first jam that doesn’t move the needle much. The Crickets funk is a pretty steady progression to Reactor trance. Solid ending. The Tunnel is so much shorter than the great September versions that I didn’t expect much, but there was a cool, albeit brief, moment where the jam departed from type one. The Basis intro is spirited and fun, with vocalizations from Barber and beatboxing from Brownie. Barber kinda ruins it by signalling the drop like 3 minutes in. The band doesn’t follow suit immediately, but the drop happens shortly after. The vocal jamming continues into the middle jam, and it works even better here. The main jam is mostly nothing to write home about. Some atonal dissonance gradually yields to a pretty standard trance progression, and eventually a standard peak. The band jams out of the GAYFM section into a mellow, almost dub section. It soon picks up the pace as it returns to Crix funk. I didn’t expect much from the Aquatic Ape, but it’s actually excellent. The dnb theme builds up to a massive uncomposed (though strongly reminiscent of Svenghali) bliss peak before breaking down back into more typical Ape territory. Sadly, there isn’t any buildup to the Ape ending. Barber takes a minute to plug the New Year’s run and immediately afterward he plays the riff out of nowhere. The M.E.M.P.H.I.S. encore seems like it might be more interesting than most of the, frankly, relatively boring versions played this year, but the main jam soon leaves the hip-hop theme in favor of another too-soon peak. The band spends way too much time messing around on the composed ending for the timestamp.

2/5. The second set is pretty devoid of interesting segments. The show highlights are definitely the Aceetobee intro and main jam. Otherwise, check out (somewhat surprisingly) the Reactor > Confro, Ape, and Tunnel.