Blind purchases

So imagine my curiosity when stumbling upon an album in Everyday Music that featured no text as an indicator for the music or even a price tag, just a volcanic eruption of color in a lyrical abstract painting. Intrigued, I took it home and gave it a spin with nothing to go on but a very open mind. What I was presented with is something I'm still mystified by as I sit here months later. Inducting the first track is a choir of crawling, cautious, rattling strings that lay the sonic terrain for a sax that swirls in and out, clucking and stumbling, whining and waning like a wounded animal searching for a place to die peacefully. The sax and strings flirt in revolutions while the drums steadily take more prominence, and onward they creep warily around each other until they reach the five minute mark and explode into violent bloody end; all players throwing their suppressions out the window and beating their instruments into oblivion. The instruments spoke volumes. And the story they were telling interjected me with bloodthirsty fascination. This is the freedom and experimental embrace that I love about Jazz.
I can't claim to be a Jazz aficionado. It's a class all its own and the ear has to acquire a taste for the unexpected. I will say that I've always found the generic, straight-up form of Jazz (saxophone, bass, basic drums) to be less than exciting. I'm more intrigued by the raw vicious experimental aspects and it seems to me that those vistas were the original draw of Jazz to begin with. The form had all but dropped from radar until innovators like Miles Davis and John Coltrane detonated the music scene and changed what everybody thought they knew. This gave air to innovations and genre bendings of all sort. Just listen to Alice Coltrane's numerous incantations, perhaps the best example being 'Journey in Satchidananda' for a true illustration in pushing the bar.
I later found the name of this mysterious group. 'Kammerflimmer Kollektief' and their album 'Incommunicado' continues much the same as the first track, very free and never predictable. Composed of just six tracks, some go as long as twelve minutes and other more bombastic numbers are as brief as forty five seconds ensuring the experience keeps you on your toes. The album flirts with vast walks of influence, fusing essence of avante-garde rock with some more modern renowned experimental lunatics like Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell, both which have a signature sound I've been able to detect yet constantly pull very pleasant surprises out of their hat to keep the creative juices flowing. Even Johnny Rotten's gotten his hands dirty with some neurotic concoctions in his Public Image Ltd. project, check out Flowers of Romance for a very free laced, tribal jazz experimentation. I highly recommend making a blind purchase, throw yourself into some section of your local music store you tend to avoid and take a chance. It's a big world and the sky's the limit.