In this thing called Hellraiser, I’m sort of terrified right off the bat, and here’s why: I’m not sure if this is made for Cenobites or by Cenobites, but either way, anything having to do with Wes Craven’s film is going to rile me up right good. Just imagining old Pinhead or the freakish Chatterer is enough to make my skin crawl. I probably won’t be able to sleep for a week now that I’m imagining these awful entities making their way into my bedroom at night. Make it a month.
So are Nate Wooley, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and Chris Corsano Cenobites? Not unless Hellraiser, the trio’s wildly inventive record on Astral Spirits, is some kind of Pandora’s puzzle box that I’m unaware of and whose malicious secret I will one day stumble upon. So that’s a no. Instead, it’s a live recording made on February 10, 2018 (somehow I find myself looking back on 2018 with nostalgia these days), at Fulton Street Collective in Chicago. If you’re familiar with contemporary (Chicago) jazz or Astral Spirits or even the colors of the sky and grass, you should be familiar with these players: Wooley on trumpet, Håker Flaten on bass, and Corsano on drums. As Icepick, the unit is an absolute force of rhythm, with Corsano and Håker Flaten shredding any preconceived ideas you may have had about what to expect and Wooley chewing scales and runs and spitting (well, blowing) them back out all over the place, splattering the rhythm section with brass like it’s shrapnel.
(Actually, now that I’ve written the word, Icepick totally sounds like a Cenobite name. Let me reconsider.)
Each player gets a chance to shine, with Wooley especially nailing his opening solo on “Chicago Deader” and Corsano and Håker Flaten fluttering and grinding particularly energetically throughout the majority of the lengthy “Blueline.” But it’s the combination of the three of them, together, onstage and huffing the collective energy, their own and that of the crowd (2018, remember). They absorb it and internalize it and share it among themselves, then they allow it to condense into a gigantic orb, crackling and fizzing, ozone filling the air, before unleashing it as performance. Hopefully everybody at the venue was OK. Also hopefully it didn’t rip open a dimensional rift through which unforeseen and unparalleled evil monsters can pass through. But again, that would only happen if Icepick’s Hellraiser was that puzzle box I mentioned earlier, and surely it isn’t that.
Is it?
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