Jam Chart for Tower Jam (1 entries)
Legend:
Highly Recommended
Attended
JOTY
| Info | Notes |
|---|---|
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59:23
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Imagining the Air Traffic Control Tower at Loring Airforce Base slowly rumbling back to life in the middle of the night, Phish uses IT's "The Tower Jam" to project their pain and confusion during the 2.0 era onto a dying relic of a past age in conjunction to the new century we found ourselves in. From 9min of sonic madness, static electricity, and Tortoise-esque musical space, the band coalesces around a sultry and seedy riff that builds into the swampy blues of Summer 2003. Around 15:20 Page enters with a haunting and menacing synth, leading Trey to develop a riff that sounds akin to the music you'd hear as a solar system collapses in on itself. A battle emerges between the synth approach from Page and the shoegaze approach from Trey, as the band leans into the horror and conflict producing the kind of music Kubrick would've killed to use in a battlefield tracking shot. Through it all - the heavy distortion and off-kilter rhythms, the strutting ideas abandoned in favor of more chaos - there is always Page's regal Baby Grand. An instrument that rooted so many 2.0 jams in an organic space, it serves here to remind the listener of the modern/classical ghoulish battle at play during the era. Even when the band refuses to come up for air, the baroque melodies offered by Page give the slightest hint of important music being composed in real time that you must follow the thread of. The last ten min are spent exploring potential routes towards a peak as effervescence builds before the band pulls itself back into space, and the tower shuts off for the foreseeable future. |
Jam chart versions are selected because of improvisational and other characteristics that distinguish these from typical versions of the song.
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