Dubious Disk is a curious case of an EP. A lot of what I read in the blurb I find hard to believe and in revisiting this album multiple times, more and more surprising things came to light. At its heart, Dubious Disk is a Jazz Fusion EP, albeit one with an Extreme Metal influence. Featuring the talents of Imperial Triumphant‘s Steve Blanco on bass and Artificial Brain‘s Oleg Zalman on guitars (with the support of Cameron Carella on trumpet and Flügelhorn), the band claims the EP to be an improvisation on a theme from their upcoming full-length album. Most of the EP is comprised of the band playing the namesake theme unisono and with clearly repeating bridges and transitions that could not come up naturally in a freely improvised piece. I am not ruling out that parts of it are improvised – solos, ending licks and the likes – but I believe most of this is planned very rigorously. To make this issue even more confusing is that the repeated main theme is actually an arrangement of a theme from the original Pokemon game for Nintendo‘s Gameboy. I would not even call this inspired by it – the main theme of Dubious Disk is clearly the Team Rocket Hideout theme, with the same transition, bridges and linear song structure. The name “Dubious Disk” might be a hint to this, as an item named Dubious Disk exists in the Pokemon Games – a fact brought to my attention by our own Cosmic Vampire.
So, who is getting juked here? The musical quality is top notch, and if Jazz Fusion at the heavier end of the spectrum sounds like a thing you would enjoy, I don´t see why you would dismiss Sarmat. The metal influence is slight, barring an explosion of intensity in the middle and you could see a band like Mahavishnu Orchestra or Return to Forever pull off similar material even in the late 70s. The musicianship is similarly high – as is to be expected from the musicians involved. The finicky rhythms and runs are filled with interesting note choices. This could just as well be considered an Avant-garde arrangement of a videogame song. Adam Neely has talked about how videogame music is becoming a new part of the Jazz Canon in a recent video. These are tunes that the Millennial generation intuitively knows, just as tin pan alley songs were ubiquitous to the Jazz Originators of the 30s and 40s. Yet, a stigma of such tunes remain. Is the origin of the theme hidden from the label, that might not take the music seriously otherwise? Is this an attempt to be more marketable to the Avant-garde metalhead, who often takes the unfortunate stance that irony equals dishonesty? Maybe even believes that such tunes could only be enjoyed ironically? Or is this just to avoid a lawsuit with a certain Japanese videogame manufacturer who is known for such reactions? Frankly, I do not know. The fact remains that Sarmat are worth your time – if this opens up more metalheads to Jazz Fusion, then I approve wholeheartedly. And getting musically bamboozled is always fun.
