It’s more like hopping in their backseat while they cruise through some hilly countryside roads that nobody knows intimately well, but aren’t brutally tough to navigate. What Deep Fried Grandeur doesn’t have is that back-pocket compass of the best semi-rehearsed, semi-improvised jams, the kind where you have no idea where it’s headed but still give yourself over to it. It’s still a faithful document, and it sounds better trimmed and toned. The pile of sounds from these nine musicians were touched up for the album by Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas and CAVE, and comparing the final version to a bootleg of the actual performance reveals modest but shrewd edits: a guitar effect is enhanced here, a transitory section shortened there. Ryu Kurosawa’s scorpion-like sitar pierces the quiet, but soon it takes off sprinting into a wide-open field, flipping into a major-key. In the first half of part two, “Shrinks the Day,” the scenery changes dramatically around a hoedown pulse. With only one afternoon to rehearse, the two bands hit the stage and hit it off.ĭeep Fried Grandeur, split into two halves for vinyl purposes but really a product of about five independent movements, is an instrumental, krautrock-ish noodle journey that spans the spectrum from tactile texture-crafting to supercharged drives. Walker’s Deafman Glance and Kikagaku Moyo’s Masana Temples, both released earlier that year, shared similar cycles of gentle dis- and re-orientation, a sense of constantly interrupted traction, like getting lost in a huge cavernous art museum and passing through vastly different soft-lit rooms while repeatedly finding and losing the exit route. The organizers had asked Walker to choose another artist for a one-time jam, and his pick was no head-scratcher.
The album, a live collaboration between Walker’s four-piece band and the Japanese psych-prog quintet Kikagaku Moyo, documents their set from the music festival Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2018 the album’s title is how they appeared on the festival’s bill. Either way, Walker’s having the last laugh with Deep Fried Grandeur, which was released on Husky Pants after multiple labels passed on it the record recently hit No.
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