Review: Milton Man Gogh – Fully Stretched
Style: Avant Jazz, Experimental, Jazz Fusion (instrumental)
Recommended for fans of: Clown Core, Ornette Coleman, Motorpsycho, John Lurie, Aphex Twin
Country: Australia
Release date: 21 November 2025
Without explanations from the creators themselves, modern art can be next to impossible to decipher: a work by Mondrian just looks like a grid with some coloured-in rectangles, a Yoko Ono performance piece just sounds like incoherent yelling. This is why most museums put little plaques next to the pieces to explain the artist’s intent: Mondrian was attempting to create “purely abstract” art, with no concrete ties to the world around us;1 Ono wanted museum visitors to actively participate in the piece, which explores and questions social norms, like whether or not it’s “okay” to shout inside a museum.2 With the artist’s goals explained, an art critic can then assess whether or not they believe the art achieves its intended purpose.
On their Bandcamp page, Australian instrumental avant jazz group Milton Man Gogh provide something like one of these little plaques, outlining the story behind their latest album, Fully Stretched. It’s the “strange, tragicomic tale” of Milton, a “fictional anti-hero”, who on previous albums “murdered a mid-tier jazz trio, [stole] a magic box, [broke] the space-time continuum, and [rewrote] reality itself”. In Fully Stretched, Milton has returned to his home timeline, and now confronts “the banality of everyday existence: bored, stressed, haunted by the knowledge that while reality has shifted, his crime still occurred”. That’s the kind of description I would expect next to the most fantastical Dalí painting in existence.3 The story is unique, but have the band faithfully executed that vision?
In modern Western music, the main melody of a piece is often sung by a vocalist or played by a guitarist. In a band without either of those, the highest-pitched instrument (whether that’s a sax, a piano, or something else) often takes centre stage. Even jazz, with its long history of virtuosic drummers and bassists, only breaks this mould occasionally—sure, you can have a little bass solo, as a treat. In terms of “taking the lead” on the melody or the rhythm, Milton Man Gogh are one of the most democratic groups this reviewer has ever heard. Fully Stretched opens with “Lizard Breath”, a short, Clown Core-esque track built around a rapid, squeaky up-and-down saxophone run, punctuated by unpredictable, seemingly random stabs by the bass and drums. While the sax carries “Lizard Breath”, in “5c Grinder”, the bass grounds the listener and the drums dance on top of it, never repeating the same phrasing or rhythm, taking meter and tempo as mere suggestions. “Rollover for the Takeover” sees both the bass and drums fall into their more traditional roles while the sax shrieks above them. From one track to the next, there’s no telling which instrument is going to chart a reasonable course or which one is going to go off on an insane tangent, creating a sense of persistent instability on Fully Stretched.
The title track is a microcosm of the kind of demented hysteria which Milton slowly and surely falls prey to when he remembers his prior misadventures: “Fully Stretched” begins with a friendly walking bassline, sparse drumming, and a flitting, fluttering sax filling in the gaps, not unlike the smooth jazzy improv from jam bands like Dave Matthews Band. Eventually, the drums and bass drop out and the saxophone becomes more strained, a man laughs maniacally in the background, and the track descends into chaos and cacophony, with the melodies slowly losing notes, falling out of time, and becoming less predictable. Eventually, the drums lose their final shreds of rationality, the bass follows suit, and everything slowly fades into silence. Then, as though the last five minutes were all one of Milton’s bad dreams, the band all come in together again with a second calm, low-tempo smooth jazz section. “Fully Stretched” is a nightmarish rollercoaster of a track that leaves you feeling like you’ve lived a thousand lives in six minutes (or at least finally went on that ayahuasca spirit journey you’ve been telling your prep school friends about). You can’t help but feel sorry for Milton and his frazzled mental state after this one.
A similar exercise is performed on “haha 2”, but instead of exploring emotional contrasts—moving from calm to chaotic and back again—it’s a wonderful study in sound and silence. Each instrument plays a few notes, then takes a comparatively longer rest. With all three overlapping, but misaligned with each other, there is a sense of space without sparseness. But the real star of this track is the percussion. The sax and bass mostly trace relatively simple melodies in a moderate tempo, while the drummer seems to be on a different planet throughout. By and large, this piece sounds like a drum solo that a few other musicians just happen to be playing on top of. The musicianship on this track is impeccable, especially the accuracy and precision with which each instrument jumps back in at the appropriate time after those long silences: it’s nothing short of surgical. Throughout it all, the band manage to make the tempo of the track comprehensible; for a song with such a fractured, fractal nature, it’s surprisingly easy to tap your foot along to.
Where Fully Stretched falls short is in its approachability. Even for your well-seasoned jazz fan, this album is dense. For your average listener, it is actively repulsive at times. The squeaky sax, the descents into chaos and noise, the metric modulation, the erratic drumming… rather than grotesque artistic flourishes to be appreciated as-is, for the casual listener, these are all hurdles to overcome. That’s not to say the album isn’t catchy—most pieces are built around one or two recurring riffs or melodies which, after a few listens, get stuck in your head just as well as any pop song—it’s just that it will be an uphill battle for a large portion of the group’s potential audience. But, like RFK’s brain worm, once they get in there, they’re stuck.
On first listen, Milton Man Gogh‘s latest album is a dense, difficult collection of way-out-there experimental jazz. In fact, that’s true for the second and third listens, as well. But Fully Stretched is the dinosaur-sponge-in-a-dissolvable-capsule of albums: the longer you let it soak, the more it grows and takes shape, twisting and wrenching itself until it’s… well… fully stretched into something recognisable, something fun. Do we understand more about Milton and his journey at the end of it all? I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that this album is an impressive body of work by a group of supremely talented musicians. While it may not make it into my regular rotation, I will definitely try (and surely fail) to explain Milton’s story to my colleagues back at The Subway. I just wish there were a few more of those little plaques.
Recommended tracks: Fully Stretched, 5c Grinder, haha 2
You may also like: James Brandon Lewis, Jaga Jazzist, The Necks
Final verdict: 7.5/10
Related links: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram
Label: Art As Catharsis
Milton Man Gogh is:
– Andrew Saragossi (soprano and tenor saxophone, composition (1, 2))
– Zac Sakrewski (electric bass, upright bass, effects, composition (6, 8))
– Benjamin Shannon (drums, composition (3, 4, 5, 7))
- https://www.canvasprintsaustralia.net.au/how-mondrian-pioneered-the-grid-in-modern-art ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/arts/design/02contemporary.html ↩︎
- It’s “Illumined Pleasures”, if you were wondering: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80021 ↩︎
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