By Nick Ostrum
Stef.in is a quartet led by Toronto drummer Stefan Hegerat. Joining him
hereare Mark Godfrey on bass and Robyn Gray and Patrick O’Reilly,
both on guitar. As the accompanying notes indicate, Icterus II,
their second album, is electric fusion inspired by 70’s Miles that doesn’t
really sound like 70’s Miles and isn’t really fusion! Maybe we can just
call this non-dogmatic music for the 21 st century schizoid
moment?
The music is heavy and makes ample use of guitar pedals that sound gooey,
glitchy and eerie. I cannot shake the impression that this is space music,
as well. It is cavernous, deep, and lonely, at times, likely to reflect the
last few years of distance and interaction mediated and distorted through
nonhuman technologies. Then again, it can be pensive and even consoling,
conveying acceptance and adaptation, as well as, in its tension, confusion
and resistance. Icterus II plays particularly skillfully with that
divide between invitation and familiarity on the one hand and estrangement
on the other. It undulates and pulses like a heat-induced fever that
elicits lucid dreams of a soft and warm but disorienting place that is just
too far away to touch and is therefore covered in a cold, sterile
protective film.
There are juicy bits of cosmic funk, wacky 8-bit zig-zags a la Zappa and
Henry Cow, deep water ambient pulses, and a surfeit of doubled psychedelic
noodling that bring to mind the Orchestra of the Upper Atmosphere. Then
again I am sure any listener will bring their own connections from early
kosmische Musik to myriad prog icons to, again, electric Miles and the
milieu around those recordings. It’s all there, though, in Hegerat’s drums,
I hear much more rock than jazz. His pedigree, however, includes Michael
Formanek, Tim Berne, Nick Fraser, Gerald Cleaver, and others that might
make the listener expect more of the latter. Of course, that’s all here, as
well.
All in all, Icterus II is deeply engaging. It sounds very much of
its time, and had it been composed just a couple years later (2025, rather
than 2023), I would wager it would sound different, maybe more scattered
and aggressive than dreamy and introspective. That is no criticism in
itself, of course. It is just a means through which I can place this
recording, which, for better or worse, I cannot avoid attempting. That is
likely because this album can be so gripping, especially in the ways in
which it plays with and transcends time (stylistically, changing time
signatures, shifting fore- and background, stretched prog-rock
constructions) and the various passages where Gray and O’Reilly face off,
one pixelated guitar vine-scroll entangling with another.
Icterus II as a download and on vinyl via Bandcamp:
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