Andrea Sartori (a.k.a. DeepAlso) helped found the Homework festival and associated label in Italy in 2002, an experience that perhaps influenced this album: The disc was assembled from live performances recorded at a jazz musician’s retreat. The tracks are crunchy, skittery, and buzzy–geared toward jazz’s sonic wandering, the genre’s tendency to absorb the world and spit it back out, transformed. The whole, however, is anchored by the percussion, which draws far more from the rhythmic regularity of techno than the fantastic explorations of jazz, where it serves less of a beat-keeping role. The album teeters between pretentious and vital, never entirely convincing one way or the other.