Club d’Elf: Live at Club Helsinki

Club d’Elf’s double-disc Live at Club Helsinki captures Mike Rivard’s remarkable Morocco-meets-space-funk fusion ensemble on a particularly spicy night in 2012. Rivard (who plays both bass and the threestringed, camel-skin-covered sintir) blends Gnawa trance music and Chaab street music with electric Miles Davis, Pink Floyd space-rock and good old American jamming. The band—John Medeski (keyboards), Brahim Fribgane (oud), Duke Levine (guitar), MiSTer RouRKe (DJ) and Dean Johnston (drums)—drifts from zone to zone as though on an alien exploratory mission, punctuated intermittently with chopped-up commentary by psychedelic elf wrangler Terrence McKenna.