I don’t know anyone who upon seeing a modern sequencer/audio production program hasn’t wondered what they could do, given time, a studio, enough coffee and a few chums to play the instruments they can’t. Just think, you could sample some stuff, lay down some grooves, play over the top of them, arrange some nice sequences and then tweak and massage them digitally until…um…until they sound good. For most musicians it ends up being the 21st Century equivalent of adding a string section to your band – it just shows up the weakness of the material and the paucity of ideas even more clearly.

Only a very precious few can survive the ruthlessly exposing environment of the digital studio and emerge with more than they went in with. And only a few of them will make anything approaching new music that doesn’t immediately remind you of something else. Among this blessed few avoiding the footsteps of Brian Eno we can now count Martin France, woefully under-rated British drum wonder, longtime best-of-British Jazz sideman and now captain (and builder) of the good ship Spin Marvel.

Justly famed amongst the stickerati for his superlative technique and taste - he’s one of the few drummers who can trigger samples without making them sound like a travelling salesman jabbing at the doorbell - France has broken new ground with Spin Marvel. The band consists of him on drums and percussion, Eno and David Holmes collaborator Tim Harries on bass, fellow former Loose Tube John Parricelli on guitar, and Norwegian drummer Terje Evensen handling keyboards, programming and sequencing.

Spin Marvel CD

In an age where everything has to be neatly labelled for marketing, it’s wonderful that artists are putting out work of this quality that evades any convenient genre. I don’t know what to call it, although there’s something here for everyone. France is best known for his Jazz work with Loose Tubes and Human Chain, but while Spin Marvel showcases his invention and ensemble sensitivity, it doesn’t sound like Jazz as we or anyone else know it. Audiophiles and Sound On Sound subscribers will swoon to the audio alchemy and brilliantly realised soundscapes but may be unfamiliar with this intensity of musical spontaneity and fire while the hard-edge improvisation (sorry “spontaneous composition”) crowd will marvel at the invention and imagination, but may puzzle at the intricacy and calculation of the production. Ascetic ambient techno monkeys will thrill at the intricacy and dynamism of the production, but might boggle at its emotional depth and sweep. Closer to our own hearts, drummer completists who already own all the other albums-by-drummers might expect another contrived menu of grooves and chops sprinkled by a few celebrity mates putting their freebie endorsee instruments through a gentle workout. No such danger here.

Spin Marvel’s success is that it has managed to capture the fierce spontaneity of the musicians’ interplay while transforming their sounds without ending up as a sonic soup. The challenge of digital production is that there are so few restrictions; there’s nothing stopping you from tweaking the sound in every direction, and infinite choice is usually a lethal environment for music, clogging every bar with every possible musical idea. This usually produces albums that are the sonic equivalent of those long-exposure photos of trotting dogs that show the legs in every possible position at once – you just want to hear the one right idea amongst all the clutter. Spin Marvel is a constellation of clear musical ideas, expressed virtuosically, and tastefully tweaking what would appear a limited palette of drums, bass, guitar beyond the familiar into new sonic territory.

France re-imagines the drumkit’s timbres in ways I’ve ever heard before: brushes on the snare are transformed into hi-hats, ride cymbals are gated into cowbells, bass guitar notes triggered as tomtoms, snare rolls suddenly machine-gun out of control as they move from sticked notes to triggered loops and bass drum notes oomph into heartbeats. It’s not all production though; it’s all grounded in the playing, and drum fans will find much to admire. Even when thundering around the kit, France is one of those drummers you feel is always listening harder than he’s playing. His chops are amazing, but they’re in harness to the music. To extend the Marvel metaphor, yes France has superpowers, but has sworn to use them only for good. Particularly impressive is France’s use of trigger pads to add samples and loops to transform texture, not just as pulse and punctuation. He tastefully supports Tim Harries’ bass study on the brooding opener “Nepenthe” with muted brushwork, but squalls over the drum’n’bassy “Black Wing” and the furious “Mono Mouth”. But for every tumultuous workout like the metallic “Gwig9”, there’s a delicate exercise in taste like the Bill Frisell-ish “Copper Field”, where the basslines and time signatures extend, droop and fold like a Dali watch. A lot of electronically-enhanced music can sound arid, but this is so evocative, it’s like the soundtrack to an imaginary film.

Spin Marvel is a challenging piece of work. You’ll either never get through it or play it all day. Highly recommended, particularly to those wondering what technology can do for instead of to music.

Ed Stern