On tour in Brazil in January 2024, Echoes of Zoo kept seeing flocks of birds wheel across the sky, hundreds of them turning at once like a single animal. “Flock Logic” came out of that. With carnival going on all around them, the band worked the idea into a fast, whirling track: the first single from their third album, Collective Intelligence out 2 October on Rebel Up! Records and Zephyrus Records,

The four come from across the Belgian scene: Nathan Daems (saxophone and nyabinghi drum) out of Black Flower, Bart Vervaeck (guitar) and Falk Schrauwen (drums) out of Compro Oro, and Lieven Van Pée (bass) out of De Beren Gieren. Since 2018 they’ve been making a loud, psychedelic sort of jazz, full of Middle Eastern microtonal melodies and West African rhythms, with a punk streak running right through it.

On the track, Daems’s saxophone takes the lead with a melody that leans East, while Vervaeck’s guitar runs off with it: quick, psychedelic, curling around the horn. About thirty seconds before the end, the whole thing drops into a false stop, a sly wink at the old psych records, then kicks back in to finish.

That flock idea runs through the rest of the album too: the way swarms and shoals move as one, and what we might pick up from it. As Daems puts it: “It’s mysterious and it’s real.”

Stream and listen to “Flock Logic” HERE