Methods Body Returns With the Challenging (And Rewarding) Plural Not Possessive
The Portland duo’s second album brings together free jazz, electronics and improvisation

If you can imagine Methods Body’s self-titled debut album – released in the unsettled spring of 2020 via New Amsterdam Records – as a rock-climbing wall, picture it as the kind with upward routes that challenge and confound, but also provide something to grab onto and hold tightly at reasonably distanced points along the way.
The five-part suite on the album’s A side, for example, makes use of the drums-and-electronics duo’s custom tunings, off-kilter polyrhythms and sampled experiments, but these elements usually coalesce into a tangible groove – a flailing groove with ragged edges, but a groove nonetheless. The result sounds like Battles for the free-jazz crowd.
For sophomore effort, Plural Not Possessive, Methods Body has not only reached the difficult section of the rock-climbing wall that tilts inward toward the ceiling, they’ve removed most of the comforting handholds and footholds. That’s not to say keyboardist Luke Wyland and drummer John Niekrasz have made an entirely inscrutable record; they still engage in an exchange of sounds that lives somewhere near a recognizable intersection of experimental jazz, glitchy electronics and collaborative improvisation. But they largely avoid the obvious grooves in favor of more amorphous forms that provide no easy path forward.