Radio Chongching, aka RC - This organic drum-and-bass jazz trio performed constantly in the late 90s, hypnotizing Seattle café dwellers with its unique improvised approach of creating recombinant soundscapes in concert, using performance samples fashioned on the fly. RC's modus operandi of writing arrangements as performance, that is, composing in realtime, was made possible using what would today be considered fairly barbaric technology: 16-bit Lexicon JamMan 32-second looping machines, of which trumpetist Lesli Dalaba, percussionist Greg Gilmore and Chapman Stick player George Soler were all keen devotees. All of RC's music was improvised live in this fashion - the trio never played the same song twice, and apparently never knew what they were going to play until they played it. Every show was different and, for the documentarily inclined, accompanied by an almost poignant sense of loss: most of their best material was never recorded. RC percussionist Gilmore in the early 90s was drummer for Mother Love Bone before teaming up with Soler and Dalaba and three other musicians on a tour of China in 1996 with Jeff Grienke's LAND. A canceled date in the city of Chongqing seemed to coincide with the heady realization that they belonged more appropriately in their own trio. Soler's Chapman Stick, a ten-stringed, two-handed tapping instrument (see [...] under his fingers produces haunting Victorian textures, a city the color of rain, longing cellos, God's synapses firing in the Void -- a huge pallete of timbres all impulsed with the viral modernity of deep, sub-bass lines that are felt rather than heard. Gilmore wields an eclectic assortment of different drums and cultural artifacts, turning the most organic-looking objects and sleight of hand into spookily digitized rhythms. Together they create a kinetic, steel geometry that banks and glides through enormous, planetless spaces. Absolutely world class. Check out Dalaba's trumpet, particularly on "On Fire" -- a Norbert Weiner, cyborg-tears vacuum tube ballad to unrequited desire -- for uncanny beauty and depth of expression. A love song to make you yearn for . . . him. Dalaba, who regularly tours Europe with Fred Frith, hails from the same mid-80's New York movement that produced former band mates - and now jazz giants - John Zorn, George Lewis and Bill Frisell (now also living in Seattle.) She's a competent acupuncturist to boot. RC's self-titled first CD was produced by Simon Whitfield of London's Camelot - the sound achieved is dark, sexy, hypnagogic - a rich, dark espresso in a rusted iron demitasse, walking barefooted in the Valles Marineris. For musicians that earned their wings in jazz and rock, the irony for RC was in being discovered and embraced by Seattle's techno and drum-and-bass DJ's, and sneered at by the local jazzers. DJ Masa pronounced RC "the most different sounding band in the US" in the late 90s, and Bill Frisell called them "dark, mysterious, rich and beautiful... and really cool." He was really right. RC went the way of all great bands: Love Suicide. This album is a must-have, if only for "On Fire" and Soler's "Dance of the Floating Needle." RC: The only 1999 CD out there that sounds like 2011. Get it. - Denise Mak