Clocking The Wheel is the 50th physical album of Chicagoan sax hero Dave Rempis’s Aerophonic label, and Rempis celebrates it with one of his long-running bands, the freewheeling trio Ballister – with American cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, augmented by double bass player Luke Stewart (of Irreversible Entanglements) – recorded live at Roulette in Brooklyn in April 2025. Stewart joined Ballister on its previous tour and played with the trio at Rhizome, Washington, DC’s home for creative music.
Clocking The Wheel is Ballister’s twelfth album. Anyone who has experienced a live performance of Ballister knows that it is a free-improvising band that is ultra-powerful, equipped with inexhaustible, fierce energy that can consume all in its path, yet it also enjoys a telepathic dynamic and poetic articulation. The strong-minded and highly experienced voices of Rempis, Lonberg-Holm, and Nilssen-Love make Ballister a band that is stronger and larger than its parts.
This performance offered two extended pieces. The opening 33-minute «Carpet Joint» featured the trio creating a sonic cyclone, with Rempis (alternating between soprano, alto, tenor, and baritone saxes), Lonberg-Holm, and Nilssen-Love feeding each other with stimulating ideas, but with the freedom for individual solos, with Rempis exercising circular breathing. There are brief soulful, balladic interludes, but Ballister flies with a rare, captivating, and uplifting forward-moving momentum.
Stewart fits organically into Ballister’s brutal, rhythmic attacks on the 40-minute «Sauce For The Goose». He established an instantly cohesive, multilayered, and propulsive rhythmic unit with the like-minded, ubiquitous Nilssen-Love, allowing Nilssen-Love to spice Ballister’s grooves with Brazilian patterns. Both Nilssen-Love and Stewart pushed Rempis, now in a Brötzmann-like merciless playing, including the way Brötzmann played his angry ballads, and Lonberg-Holm, in a completely free and totally possessed playing, adding a distorted aroma to the volatile mix, upwards into the stratosphere. Another great performance of Ballister for the books.
Eyal Hareuveni
Dave Rempis (soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone), Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello), Paal Nilssen-Love (drums), Luke Stewart (double bass)
