Full Blast - Live in Rio (2018)

On a small street in Rio de Janeiro’s Botafogo neighborhood, an upper-middle-class beachfront community tucked up against scenic Guanabara Bay, sits a small but potent artistic institution known as Audio Rebel. The multi-use space has served many purposes since its doors opened in 2005; today, it’s not only a venue and recording space, but also a respected instrument store, complete with its own luthiery shop. For the members of Peter Brötzmann’s trio Full Blast, however, Audio Rebel carries a particular sort of significance, as the grand finale of the band’s exhausting, six-date romp through Brazil and Chile in 2016—one of their most powerful shows to date.

“It was the last show of six concerts in a row in Brazil: every day a flight, every night a different city,” bassist Marino Pliakas recalls from his home in Switzerland. The band was certainly exhausted when they took the stage for the closing night, but Pliakas remembers the small club being packed and full of energy (he also adds that Brötzmann, at 77, is “not the youngest anymore,” but in a positive way).

Full Blast are set to return to Audio Rebel as part of another Brazilian/Chilean trek in October. In anticipation of round two, the labels Trost and QTV linked up for Live in Rio, an album-length remaster of the 2016 performance, assembled from the venue’s in-house recordings. Pliakas and the group’s drummer, Michael Wertmüller, cut Audio Rebel’s raw tapes down to five tracks that would fit within the limitations of vinyl. Even with that streamlining, the record unfolds primarily as a crushingly heavy, 40-minute slab of aggressive three-way improvisation and barrages of percussion, accented by Brötzmann’s volcanic sax eruptions.

Of course, Full Blast wouldn’t be Full Blast without Brötzmann—and when he, Pliakas, and Wertmüller play simultaneously, they never let one steamroll the other, but rather bolster each other’s countermelodies instead. “Peter’s always got big ears and is very much hearing and interacting,” agrees Pliakas. “If his co-players are not able to oppose something, then he just plays, of course. But with Michael and myself, it’s almost a jazzy approach, depending on each other and listening and firing at each other and stopping together and hearing crossfades. In my opinion, he’s a very good listener.”

Brötzmann’s incendiary approach to art—audible from his legendary 1968 album Machine Gun, through his late ’80s/early ’90s work with Sonny Sharrock, Bill Laswell, and Ronald Shannon Jackson in Last Exit, and up to his present-day performances with compatriots like drummer Paal Nilssen-Love or fellow saxophonist Mats Gustafsson—might lead some to assume he doesn’t listen much to his bandmates, that he’s just doing his thing and leaving the other musicians to construct a context around him. The other members of Full Blast, though, insist that he is a thoughtful improviser and a careful listener, and the proof is in Live in Rio. “Peter is a very strong personality,” Wertmüller admits, but adds, “He would never say ‘don’t do this’ or ‘don’t do that.’ He is so strong that you always know what’s right or wrong. That means that [if] you do something strong enough, with conviction, it’s OK, and you can do whatever you want.”