“Invite Your Eye,” by Ilhan Ersahin, Dave Harrington, and Kenny Wolleson, is a big, swirling album of spaced-out jams. It’s got elements of jazz fusion, drone, and early 00’s post-rock. There are songs with charismatic grooves and songs that meditate studiously on a phrase or two or interrogate an idea slowly. Ersahin, Harrington, and Wolleson’s work has both the feel of free improvisation and studied, considered revision, songs generated from wild, exploratory playing and then taken apart, rearranged, rewritten.
“And It Happens Every Day,” the album opener, shows what the trio are capable of and where they draw their inspiration. The track starts with chiming, rattling percussion, then guitar and sax, slow and spare, lots of space. More percussion appears about a third of the way through the track, and the song takes on a kind of storm-on-the-horizon vibe of gathering momentum (the slow groove the band hits halfway through “And It Happens Every Day” suggests some of those beautiful early Do Make Say Think records). There’s a nice group statement around the five-minute mark and some great guitar by Harrington, and then a disintegration/fade out into sax and chimes.
“Invite Your Eye” launches straight into a multi-tracked sax weaving into and around itself, then busts into one of the best beats on the album around the one-minute mark, accompanied by more righteous declarations from the sax. A weird, degraded guitar (?) enters, dropping, lurching behind the sax. Besides having one of the best grooves on the album, the title track is also probably the noisiest and maybe the most reminiscent of Darkside, Harrington’s group with Nicolas Jaar. The track ends with clattering percussion, coins in your pocket as you walk at a brisk pace down the street.