PM+ CD

Project Perfect were the tricksters of Portland's music community during the days of their frequent and strange performances (2002-2004). Appearing live in costume or with exotic dancers on stage, the group's deadpan humour was at odds with their profoundly introspective, abstract music. Following from their membership in Fontanelle, the two long-time collaborators came into their own with a reputation for consistently dextrous live performances, a distinctively insular sonic vocabulary, and a fluid, telepathic improvisatory rapport. Project Perfect's mastery over sounds takes them jump-cutting from squiggles, squonks, and blurts of random (yet eerily on-target) radio broadcasts, to moments of austere, dry guitar and piano interplay. Hopping between tender and bombastic moods, introspection and extroversion, delicacy and jarringness, the band's sense of variety within a narrowly defined sonic palette is unmatched. Their approach comes from some oblique musical reference points (Runegrammofon label, Cabaret Voltaire, Conrad Schnitzler and Cluster come to mind), but this was a group that truly did not sound like any other. "PM+" adds additional tracks to the original recording "PM", a CD that was essentially privately released by conceptual arts group Red76, in 2002. Completely undistributed, and never exposed to local or outside press, "PM" came to us as a crucial piece of lost Portland music, along with additional recordings the band made in 2003. Andy Brown was a founding member of the celebrated early kranky band Jessamine, as well as of its less-understood successor, Fontanelle. He has also been part of the drone group Southerning, and is now of the audio/visual trio Paint & Copter. Charlie Smyth (also ex-Fontanelle) has worked in everything from skronking jazz-rock (with Seattle's Laundry in the 1990's) to free improvisation (in the early 2000's) and most recently, as a folk-rock songwriter in Chicago, Berlin, and Seattle. Please share our enjoyment of this singular, intimate, and cosmic recording.