Multiform Palace – New Form Harmony

3.8.23 by Ryan Masteller

With all this talk of defiant jazz, I can’t help but thinking that Brooklyn’s Multiform Palace is riding the crest of the wave into eternal success. You can’t fault anyone for doing such a thing; you grab a hook, you make that hook work itself into everyone’s subconscious, until you’re just walking down the street one day and every jerk on the block is humming the hook you came up with. It’s an absolutely foolproof, solid gold, #1 business plan for the aspiring musician to follow. Can’t fail. Eternal success.

Multiform Palace feels like the perfect conduit for a defiant jazz typhoon. Cutting and pasting (which is called “sampling” to those of you who venture beyond Microsoft Word) from generously hooky sources (none of which I’m at liberty to divulge, if in fact I knew what they were), Multiform Palace slow-cooks a head-nodding jam sesh and lets it marinate in the tape deck in the sun. What results is a generously basted and righteously smeared kaleido-topia, famously crackling with the sharpest beats. It comes off as something that SHOULD be on the 100% Bootleg label, right next to the latest Mid-Air! joint. 

Adding a little EXTRA defiance is the fact that Multiform Palace got “voices, ideas, and inspiration” from The Guerilla Art Action Group’s 1970 action interview on WBAI radio (which has actually been released on vinyl). Read a little bit about their works “Blood Bath” and “And Babies” in protest of the Vietnam War and the MoMA board’s complicity in and ties to companies involved as proponents of it. As our friend Dr. Peter J. Woods is fond of saying, FTAM! (I think that means something against art museums, and there’s a bad word in there somewhere.)

Tape out on Specious Arts – what are they gonna bring us next?