Major late-career entry for the legend Alvin Lucier here, released on Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle. "Criss-Cross" is Lucier's first composition for guitar and written for performers Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley. Ambarchi in the left channel, O'Malley on the right, and they "improvise on a single semitone" producing a woozy and pulverizing tone falling in and out of sync, increasing and decreasing speeds, I hate to say stuff like this but you can almost hear other sounds being conjured up by the thick drone, just around the edges, although at least one of them is the disorienting sound of e-bows on strings. Quite something; to be played loud. "Hanover" features Ambarchi and O'Malley on guitars again, joined by a variety of players on alto and tenor sax, violin, piano and bowed vibraphone. The piece is inspired by Lucier's father (appearing on the cover) and a reimagining of that ghostly departed band. It's slow, heavy on spectral tones. Very haunting and beautiful.
I keep up with Sunburned only intermittently these days, they seem to be taking a more rock-ist approach lately. Like this one. Each track is about 4-5 minutes of pretty ramshackle, jammy, funky, boogie rock...almost spoiled by the throaty, beery vocals shouted over the top of each one of these tunes with nonsensical platitudes. I almost shut it off after a couple tracks but I stuck it out and kinda came around on some level. I was oddly reminded of My War era Black Flag sludge punk. The band sez "these Holy Grail fueled recordings are a mix of iphone and zoom recordings run through garageband, reaper and some plug-ins. We're still working on the much more listener-friendly Black Dirt session..." and point taken, listener friendly this ain't.
Comments
Post a Comment