Nels Cline’s is probably best known as Wilco’s guitarist on their recent albums Sky Blue Sky and last years Wilco (The Album). Both were at the more commercial end of the band’s range, ironic given all the work Cline has been involved in over the years. Although traversing many musical genres and styles, it’s fair to say most of his output has been improvisational or rooted in experimentation of some kind, whether with his own current jazz outfit The Nels Cline Singers or through numerous solo and collaborative projects. His most recently released solo effort, Dirty Baby, is a collection of improvised ‘soundtracks’ to artwork by Ed Ruscha and David Breskin of all kinds. And the prolific range of his output shows no sign of any let up, at least if the ‘news’ page of his official website is anything to go by: a myriad of musical engagements, either ticked off (done that!) or pencilled in as ‘awaiting instructions’ or, intriguingly, ‘lurkers‘. Let’s just say, the grass doesn’t grow under this guy’s feet.

So Floored By Four is one of these projects: 4 musicians, 4 songs, although primarily the musical lovechild of bassplayer Mike Watt, famous for his work with Minutemen and Firehose, now gainfully employed as The Stooges’ bass, but with an experimental-jazz pedigree and a long history of work with Cline. Multi-instrumentalist Yuka Honda joins them on keyboards, well known for her involvement with indie band Cibo Matto and a whole variety of projects centred around the New York music scene, with former partner and fellow New York musician, drummer Dougie Bowne, making up the Four. So a wealth of talent, experience, history and musical understanding to explore … but not always a recipe for success, in fact the alarm bells are sounding already … DANGER – JAZZ-ROCK FUSION!

Watt started proceedings by sketching out the bass lines for the four ‘floored’ main compositions, each dedicated to one of his partners. These were sent out as mp3 files with the most basic instructions, and the band then came together in New York during the July heatwave this year to put musical flesh on the bones of the songs. The recording process was hot and sticky and the music veers wildly between regular playing and improvisation, in a spirit something akin to Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew. A lot of the playing patterns are repeated throughout the recording as the band explore a variety of music, guitar atmospherics mixed with weird funk motifs, some free-form jazz, Stax R&B and even straight blues-rock. The music freeforms its way along for 45 minutes without losing impetus, perhaps a measure of the intuition and understanding between the players.

It’s less clear exactly what Watt had in mind with each named track, aiming to “bring out the personalities for each tune … but make it a team effort”, not always easy to see where the join is. ‘Nels’ is the easiest to spot, the characteristic guitar feedback and distortion at the beginning like a spaceship lifting off, reaching the stars in a haze of keyboard atmospherics, then some hard rock wah-wah noodling before returning to something sounding peculiarly like Blur’s ‘Strange news from another star’. The changes of tempo later on slot into a nice groove, somewhere between Can’s Tago Mago and Miles. The guitar break at the end of the piece is met with strange bird-like noises generated by Honda’s keyboard again, and some Hendrix-like guitar-shredding … all in a day’s work for Wilco’s axeman I’d say!

Next up, we are met with delicate xylophone and keyboard fills at the beginning of ‘Yuka’, which curiously stops with an apology by Watt of “Sorry I’ll do it with my fingers”, before the song is re-ignited with a New Age mantra set to blues-rock sludge:

“From the eyes of fire, fire flows”

“From the eyes of wind, wind blows?”

“From the eyes of light, light grows”

“From the eyes of water, water flows”

‘Eyes Of fire’ was a working title for the album, apparently. Watt’s vocals sound rather trippy and curiously like Captain Beefheart on Troutmaster Replica.

Watt floors himself with ‘Mike’, all bubblegum twangy guitar and beat combo Staxy-Booker-T organ. Nice riffing between bass and guitar, which ‘sings’ Verlaine-esque like the Marquee Moon song ‘Venus’. There’s an experimental flourish at the end, but the fun and japes end too quickly, giving way to 20-minute finale ‘Dougie’, which meanders along, soars and builds hypnotically, with little percussive ‘interludes’ to break the motif slightly, but in the end conjurs up more a mood than a climax, as Cline’s guitar gets weird and woozy with long sustain.

There is a danger of making musical ‘soup’ here, and I wasn’t totally ‘floored’, but to its credit the music seems to stay just the right side of the Jazz-rock divide. You could make an argument for culling an ep from the outtakes, but that would be missing the point somewhat. Accusing jazz improv. of being self-indulgent is a bit like saying Hendrix guitar solos take too long! You can hear a lot of fun in these recordings and the blast they are obviously having is infectious. One imagines the sound would probably transmit well into the live arena, ironically something the band had to do, being asked to support M.Ward’s ‘Summerstage’ concert at Central Park on 1st August 2010, only 3 days after these recordings were finished.