Ian Preece reviews a veritable medley of excellent new guitar sounds from across the pond.
Chuck Johnson’s Balsams, Marisa Anderson’s Cloud Corner, William Tyler’s Goes West, Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir’s Vin Du Select Qualitite Solo Acoustic, Volume 14…Glenn Jones, Sarah Louise, Daniel Bachman, steel string, lap-steel, pedal-steel, mint-green 1960s Stratocasters, Martin Acoustics, vintage jazz-boxes…I thought I’d had my fill of American solo guitar music, and that these albums couldn’t really be topped. They would have said the same thing about Robbie Basho and John Fahey in the 1970s and 1980s, I guess. When I spoke to Steve Lowenthal (author of Dance of Death, a biography of John Fahey, and the don of VDSQ records) in a diner in LA for my book Listening to the Wind, he told me that while he has deep love and respect for a lot of guitar stylists, he is only really interested in people who are pushing the envelope of 21st century guitar music – players who ‘have a profound vision of what that could be’. None of these records are necessarily totally revolutionary or groundbreaking in what you can do with a guitar, electric or pedal steel – but all of them, I think, have a profound oneness, vision and beauty; and they breathe new life and pull and distort the envelope in myriad ways.
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Recorded between Portland and LA, I can easily imagine driving down Highway 1 through the Redwood forests and the misty purple and orange light listening to North Americans’ short, sweet slice of American pastoral, Roped In (Third Man). Their last album featured Juliana Barwick; this one is pretty dreamy and trippy too, Patrick McDermott’s gentle fretwork embroidered with Mary Lattimore’s glistening, rippling harp and Barry Walker’s pedal-steel flourishes that softly detonate then fall through Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur ‘starmooched firmament’. Legendary new age crystal thinker Iasos would have dug this on his houseboat in Sausalito in the sixties. Like with all great records, there’s plenty of space in these grooves, and, on tracks like ‘American Dipper’ and ‘Yearling’, beautifully lazy loops or figures that circle to infinity. There’s something about ‘Good Doer’ that reminds me of Ernest Hood’s plaintive, simple, homespun synth melodies on his 1975 LP Neighborhood – queasy, but in a good way. The fluffier, lighter, dreamier tracks are in the middle of the LP; William Tyler guests on the opening ‘Memory of Lunch’, bringing just a hint of background fuzz and dissonance. He appears again at the end, as the shadows lengthen on ‘Greetings from a Distant Friend’. (Actually, forget the west coast vibes: ‘Furniture in the Valley’ could almost be Virginia Astley and her daughter Florence boating on the Thames near Henley on a summer afternoon, such is the airy serenity and tranquillity of the gently strum harp.) The gorgeous, closing ‘Break Maiden’ is full of quiet wonder again.
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Chuck Johnson’s Balsams is a pedal steel album so beautiful you wonder how he could possibly top it; cosmic ambient duo Golden Retriever have serious chops with their deep space bass clarinet and modular synth jams – seven years on the Portland duo’s Seer still sounds incredibly fresh and ahead of its time; Balsams has just been repressed on VDSQ again – so I guess at first it was unsurprising that their collaboration Rain Shadow felt somehow overloaded, almost too maximalist for any connoisseurs of the understated. But this is a record I keep returning to – in fact, in this year of paralysis, of standing in a trance in front of the record player with not exactly anywhere to go, Rain Shadow (Thrill Jockey), an LP that slowly blends bass clarinet, pedal steel and synth tones, drones and effects, reaching mountainous heights, is top biscuit. Enjoy the view from up on high, as this music is as holy and pure as, say, Jon Gibson or Peter Zummo – New York minimalists by name, but packing their records with a lot of alluring, fascinating detail. ‘Sage Thrasher’ for the most part feels gloriously inappropriately named – the tranquil, gradually filling soundscape feels more akin to a soundtrack of street lighting slowly coming on at dusk – until you remember the sage thrasher is not a piece of farm machinery but a songbird native to the west coast of America, and eventually the track becomes subsumed in a momentous flood of almost Fennesz/MBV/Simon Scott-style speaker-shaking epic beauty.
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Largely improvised and quite a gnarly beast – if I’m honest I still battle some days with the knotty side of this team-up – Marisa Anderson and Jim White’s The Quickening (Thrill Jockey) is all process/journey rather than end destination. Anderson’s roiling guitar and White’s martial brush strokes leave something of a dustcloud at the climax of ‘Last Days’ which closes a side of alternately sullen and fiery, cascading guitar and drums. It was recorded quite quickly in Portland, then finished in Mexico, ‘One song was pre-composed, everything else was us going at it,’ Anderson told The Wire. ‘The Other Christmas Song’ is a glorious spume up of open fretwork and clattering drums, my current riposte to a neighbour’s circular saw, but is unlikely to turn up on a Woolworth’s festive compilation CD any time soon. Yet like in a tight, furious football match, spaces begin to increasingly show late in the second half as the pace drops. With White’s distantly rumbling toms and a beautiful descending guitar, ‘18 to 1’ is just gorgeous – you half expect a spoken word intro from Willy Vlautin, head in hands at the racetrack, to break in at any moment.
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I haven’t seen Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, but coming from the director of Old Joy (Will Oldham in the hot tub in the woods in Oregon) and soundtracked by William Tyler’s sparse dulcimer and guitar (out on Merge), I can almost imagine a fair bit of slow farm footage, cows standing around out in the sleet and snow; whiskey-drinking from the still in a rundown shack; and the rainy tail-lights of tractors in the mud and cars on the highway in the gloaming – all à la Jim Szalapski’s Heartworn Highways. I’m very probably wrong about that – the film looks a bigger budget affair, concerning frontier life – but what the fragments and vignettes of Tyler’s stripped-back playing reveal is a kind of essence of William Tyler(ness): beautiful shards and figures of melody in close-up. It brings to mind my favourite Wilco CD – the unvarnished sketches, demos and bits and pieces that came with The Wilco Book – Bruce Langhorne’s masterpiece The Hired Hand and, more strangely, Midnight Cowboy. Maybe that’s the slight cheery folksiness in ‘An Opening’ – yet the same riff in ‘A Closing’ somehow feels darker; however sunny the morning, clouds are usually not far off.
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Eli Winter’s meandering kayak trip down the river of life that is the opening 22-minute ‘Either I Would Become Ash’ on the 23-year-old Chicagoan’s first widely available LP, Unbecoming (American Dreams), is an excellent bold and epic statement full of feints, cross-currents, eddies and quiet contemplative stretches – and where you wouldn’t think it still possible to ring beautiful, bright new melodies and hooks out of a 6-string, ‘Maroon’ is startlingly fresh and edged with Sam Wagster’s yearning pedal steel and Tyler Damon’s puttering drums. I love the slightly rougher live cut, ‘Dark Light’, too, recorded in a bar somewhere in Hyde Park on the South Side, complete with fuzz, muffled audience chat and laughter – a real spiritual moment of a closer. One day I might just go and live in Chicago, greatest musical city on the planet.
Ian Preece is the author of ‘Listening to the Wind: Encounters with 21st Century Independent Record Labels’. We’ve previously published extracts on the Clay Pipe Music, Sahel Sounds and Analog Africa labels. You can order a copy of the book here.