This album is heavy. It's heavy, heavy jazz. Studio 1 is the kind of album that you can pull out when someone says that jazz is boring, polite, or even dead. How best to explain how heavy this jazz is? How about noting that the bassist is Trevor Dunn, perhaps more known from Fantomas, or Naked City. Box are something of a supergroup of jazz players, with the individual members having connections to Supersilent, Terje Rypdal, Evan Parker and, just to make things extra strange, Frank Zappa. The format is drums, bass, synth, and guitar with a little bit of viola thrown in for variety. This album is from live recordings to tape, with no edits or overdubs. Box's sound is grey; a grimy, industrial sound. The synth has a big part in this, often sounding like ethnic percussion constructed out of scrap metal. When the synth isn't soloing, it is usually providing textural backdrops that throw the other voices into stark relief. The guitar is fuzzed-out, distorted, and the playing has an aggression more common in metal or noise rock. The nervous skeleton that is the rhythm section is furtive with nervous tics and small explosions of energy, rarely settling into a straight beat. However, when there is call for it, the bass and drums get very heavy, and play rhythms that are both hard and tight.

The album opens with a 17-minute epic, “Untitled 9”. Starting slow and moody, the music reaches a critical mass and breaks into a run, with a distorted guitar solo making one think that if Can had released a metal album, the result might sound similar. The guitar is joined by a grainy, burbling synth line, but just as it's really getting going, everything stops, cuts out, and there is left only a hum in the background, which gradually shifts through some tonal clusters. A viola comes in, with a sound both grating and beautiful. As drums and bass return, the activity intensifies again, and the track spills out all over the audio range for four or five glorious minutes. The other five tracks are all under half the length of the opener and are further explorations of the moods found on the first track, with much variety to appreciate. “Untitled 13” has a chugging unison between guitar and bass interspersed with sweet and sour solos. The closer, “Untitled 12”, is languorous, rising like an incoming tide.

Studio 1 is not an album that will yield fantastic melodic gifts or sunny moods. But it is saturated with expressive playing by musicians who truly work as a group. It boggles the mind to know that these guys had never met, let alone played together, before entering the studio. Highly recommended for fans of challenging, progressive music.