Recollection Harvest Revivew
Publication: Downtown Music Gallery
Reviewer: Michael Anton Parker

I've been tickled pink by every Djam Karet album I've heard, and this is yet another welcome example of their heavy prog twin-guitar sound that still retains the special feeling of their early classics. In fact, I can hear little fragments on this new album that seem right off Burning the Hard City (I should know--I played that album dozens of times when I was a teenager!), and I think it has as much to do with the signature drumkit style of Chuck Oken as anything else. He's one of the all-time greats of prog drumkit, with a fusion-informed style that jumps out almost as distinctively as Bill Bruford. It's great when a musician has "a thing" that you know and love, really one of the special pleasures of being a fan that ages like fine wine. This is real barnstormer like The Devouring, with that fluid and spacy sound perfectly balanced against a fusiony, raging guitar attack. It's just the ticket for fans of Nelbelnest, Larks/Red and post-Thrak eras of King Crimson, Spaced Out, and other classics of avant-prog with a thick, aggressive, melodic guitar/keyboard style and throbbing, surging, aggressive bass guitar. This is peak Djam Karet and would be as good of an intro to the band as the earlier ones. Recollection Harvest really smokes! In addition to this full new studio album Recollection Harvest, the disc also contains a shorter album called Indian Summer in a totally different style. Actually, I've never heard anything like this from Djam Karet, though I haven't heard their recent spate of self-released discs, so it might not be their first foray into these waters. In the past they used to alternate between a hard-prog style and a space/ambient style, often merging the two wonderfully, but on Indian Summer they're into something mellow and somewhat ambient-oriented, but more pseudo-ethnic-tribal and busy than their well-known beatless deep-space classics Suspension & Displacment and Collaborator. It's a bit like a lighter and brigher O Yuki Conjugate I suppose. I'm rather more excited about the Recollection Harvest part of the release, but I'll have to see if Indian Summer grows on me beyond "very nice". Kudos to Cuneiform for releasing such a great package with two separate albums in an economical and convenient format. This is the 7th Cuneiform release for Djam Karet and I have nothing but praise for all of them!