pareidolia and steve raegele

"The phenomenon of perceiving faces in clouds or hearing hidden messages whilst listening to records backwards is referred to by the doctors as pareidolia – one of Steve's song titles. On Last Century we hear messages and see faces. And we hear code. Lots of code. It is beautiful and soulful music but it is not warm. Nor is it lyrical. Nor does it overtly groove much. It's paranoid and hopeful at the same time, like Steve. And like Sisyphus (the title of another one of Steve's tunes), Steve has his own rock to push. Steve's rock is jazz. The music on this disc, it seems to me, exists chiefly to facilitate a kind of terse, textural, and conceptual improvising very unique to this trio...The music is complex and layered and unsettling and sometimes caustic and mean and almost totally homoerotic. The swells, static, vibrations, trash talk, code and other dirty details sifting through this record are its gold."