Short Reviews [Trinary System - 2025 - "The Hard Machine"]

Roger Clark Miller formed his first band, Sproton Layer, all the way back in 1969 and he views it as his first really good rock band. The second was Misson of Burma (1979), and then in 2012 he decided to move away from post-punk and thought of creating a new band which allowed him to free up his guitar. He had played with Larry Dersch in his duo Binary System, and met multi-instrumentalist Andrew Willis while Andrew was engineering an Alloy Orchestra score and asked him to join Trinary System on bass and synthesizer. This is their second album since then (by their own admission they don’t play together very much) with Roger C. Miller providing guitars, vocals, Mellotron, cornet, piano, P. Andrew Willis provides basses, micro-synths, vocals, with Larry Dersch on drums, whisky flask. In many ways this is what Talking Heads would be doing if they were more angular (so jagged that the chords are coming out of the speakers like razor blades), and if the last 45 years hadn’t taken place. This is art rock with edge, it is not designed to be music to be 100% enjoyed, but also not something to be endured, but in that uncomfortable place in the middle where one can sense the pop melodies being strangled just after they have been created. It is not an album I liked at all the first time I played it, but the more I got into it the more I realised just how good this is, as it is only by playing the album all the way through a few times that one understands fully what is going on. How people listen to shuffled music on streaming platforms I will just never know. There are times when it feels almost like an orchestra playing a heavily scored piece, at others it is free and off the wall, yet there is always a complete mastery of space within the arrangements which works incredibly well. I can only imagine what this music is live when they play live, as it must be incredibly frenetic and full of passion. Apparently, they feel they started finding their own path when the trio covered Miles Davis' "Black Satin" and Can's "You Doo Right", two very different compositions which come from an area of artistic freedom, which is also what we have here. One to savour.