Rumor has it that Stains is Count G’s “commercial album”. Whatever that might mean, like a little book of musical poems, Stains exhibits much of the idiosyncratic sculpting of sound we’ve come to recognize as Count G’s signature.
A study of rhythm in a variety of musical modes, from drum-and-bass to ambient noise or free jazz, the music highlights the interplay between percussive sounds and reed or horn instruments – Count G’s love of reeds goes back to his youthful clarinet improvisations and his formative relation to jazz – as well as the contrast between danceable beats and twisted noise.
Stains allows a lot of room for random developments and improvisational playing alongside tightly constructed rhythms and strict arrangements, yet improvised solos are sometimes transposed to tracks other than the ones in which they were generated, perhaps in the way that Frank Zappa called "heterochronicity". The result is a strange coherence between otherwise disparate musical attitudes, interwoven by organic associations of sound that embrace both structure and randomness.
