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dustedmagazine · 5 months ago

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Dust Volume 10, Number 6, Part II

Matthew J. Rolin

The June dust continues with artists from the second half of the alphabet. Check out Part I, too, if you haven't already.

David Murray Quartet — Francesca (Intakt)

David Murray’s playing has always contained a dialogue between jazz’s vanguard and its canon, but as befits an artist who has sustained a music career since the 1970s, he’s not immune to the lure of practicality. These impulses converge in this quartet, which includes drummer Russell Carter, pianist Marta Sanchez and bassist Luke Stewart. It’s capable of containing moments of combustion within a framework sufficiently swinging that you could book the band into the Village Vanguard. The material is mostly original, save a waltzing interpretation of Don Pullen’s “Richard’s Tune” that contrasts the popping ebullience of the leader’s bass clarinet against Sanchez’s sumptuous piano, and if you have followed Murray in recent times, you’ve heard some of them elsewhere. Thus the record becomes a chance to appreciate Murray’s bold tenor sax tone and full-to-bursting phrasing within an idiomatic context.

Bill Meyer

Noroth — Sacrificial Solace (Carbonized)

This new slab of OSDM from Seattle-based Noroth may be ironically titled. If you play this record loud (and there is no other thinkable way to experience it), solace is surely what you will sacrifice. Song titles are suggestive: “Poisoned Ash,” “Pleading Depths,” “Devoid of Grace.” The band keeps things succinct (eight tunes that linger around the three-minute mark, and most of them short of that) and very, very far removed from anything smacking of subtlety. It’s all down-tuned strings, repulsive growls and gut-shuddering riffs, just the thing for your next abject crawl through a dank, dismal dungeon. Or for your next run to Costco. Which are essentially the same thing. It’s nice to know that bands still want to make this sort of record: gross, but not replete with itineraries of torture performed on women’s bodies; piledriving, rather than invested with the tedious dissonance of much current war metal; stoopid, but not edgelord-ish about it. Sort of refreshing, if a record including a song called “Symphony of Decay” can be conceived of as refreshing.

Jonathan Shaw

Old Million Eye — Quartz Hive (Feeding Tube)

COVID’s been around long enough that we now have post-pandemic rock. Old Million Eye is mainly one guy, Dire Wolves bassist Brian Lucas, and prior recordings have demonstrated that he can definitely go it alone. But who among us didn’t want to make up for bypassed hangs when the proscriptions against gathering were lifted? Eleven musicians join Lucas here and there across this LP, but honestly, the guest keys, reeds and strings all melt into Lucas’ existing sound world so completely that naming the players seems gratuitous. Let’s just suppose that they had a good time laying tracks down together, and that these good vibes have nestled themselves into the spaces between the reverberating twangs, distant voices and slow-flowing, melodic textures. Never mind the before and afters, this stuff is all about putting the brakes on the present.

Bill Meyer

Only Now — Eyes of Pain (Shaytoon)

Bay Area producer Kush Arora AKA Only Now, filters Punjabi music through a mixture of drum & bass and harsh ambience to produce a harder version of what Talvin Singh and Badmarsh & Shri were doing around the turn of the century with Indian classical music and dance beats. Eyes of Pain skips between the extreme cut-up of the title track and the spectral ambience of the excellent closing track “Perma.” The former is deconstruction of Punjabi percussion and vocal samples set to thumping club beats which creates stifling intensity though repetition. All tension, no relief. The latter a lengthy exercise in abstraction and space, which builds into a lattice of drones before folding in on itself. For the most part Arora emphasizes abrasive textures, lightning edits, and blistering tempos. You can dance but it will hurt, in a good way.

Andrew Forell

REZN — Burden (Sargent House)

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The chaps in REZN have a lot of feelings, buried deep inside, in need of expression. These are not nice feelings, haunted as they are by obsidian streams, liminal cells, suffocating silence, useless intentions, the razor’s edge and the human condition. To facilitate their expression, the quartet aim for a heavy, claustrophobic mirror of existential dread. Bleak burdens weigh them down and they are never quite able to get out from beneath them. At once seductive and repulsive, the miserabilism of Burden will no doubt exhilarate many and not completely without reason. But these fever dreams produce rather timid monsters. Caught somewhere between metal, goth and grunge they end up in a performative no-man’s land It’s not awful, just not enough and despite the sax on “Soft Prey,” the opening riffage on “Chasm” and moody instrumental interlude “Descent of Sinuous Corridors,” Burden feels bloodless.

Andrew Forell

Matthew J. Rolin — Twos (Dead Currencies)

The second installment in Matthew J. Rolin’s series of odds-and-sods collections of solo recordings from the past few years, Twos is more polished and cohesive than Ones, which was released in 2021. Whereas the earlier album features artifacts of the recording process such as hiss and the shuffling of the guitarist getting ready to play, Twos has been professionally mastered so that the sound is consistent and pristine. Rolin sticks mainly to the acoustic six-string, with one piece each on 12-string and electric, and the tracks are more concise, ranging from three to six minutes. Several are also sweetened with unobtrusive electronics and/or studio effects, including the 12-string piece (“Candle”). The standouts such as the jaunty “Maple Leaves” and the leisurely “Untitled 2” rank with the best of Rolin’s compositions, and Twos over all provides a welcome check-in following the outstanding Passing from 2022 and in anticipation of his next solo guitar release.

Jim Marks

Christelle Séry / Jérôme Descamps — Te Ti’amā (Clean Feed)

Here’s a recording situation you don’t find every day. Both guitarist Christelle Séry and trombonist Jérôme Descamps have a bit of classical training, and an audible influence in their playing from decidedly non-classical sources. But Descamps has spent the last quarter century off the continental touring circuit, working as a music professor in Tahiti, where he also plays in a duo that serenades newborns at the local neonatal unit. Séry’s background is a bit less exotic. She’s recorded new composed music, which she has mostly presented in France. The joint credits for this encounter, which was recorded in Tahiti, leave ambiguous how much was composed and how much improvised, so let’s just say that they avail themselves of maximum freedom. Séry plays multi-hued, post-Sonic Youth noise one moment and slithery blues gestures the next, while Descamp seems equally comfortable crafting arcing, eerie melodies and throat-parching rasps the next. They move easily in and out of idiomatic contexts, sounding equally persuasive across the spectrum.

Bill Meyer

Chloë Sobek, Tim Berne — Burning Up (Relative Pitch)

The plan to get Chloë Sobek and Tim Berne to partner up didn't necessarily make sense. The two both show a great willingness to experiment, but Sobek's violone — an ancestor of the double bass that she frequently supports with electronics — wasn't necessarily calling for Berne's alto saxophone as natural conversationalist. The two artists met when they came in to record the improvised pieces that became Burning Up. The two might have been new to collaborating with each other, but they took to the arrangement quickly, Berne figuring out how to control his sound against Sobek's soft instrument as each artists nimbly moved between textural scaffolding and more aggressive lead lines. Part of the initial joy in listening to the album comes from hearing them slide in and out of complimentary roles. That begins to sound almost easy, though, as they become more confident and ambitious. On “Icarus and the Phoenix,” Sobek matches Berne's staccato bursts; it's tough to tell who provides direction when the two lines intertwine so nicely. “Burnishing” briefly sounds bluesy, but the artists move into stranger territory, Sobek's deep pulse building menace into the night. The pair turn a corner late in the track, Berne brightening his lead and Sobek taking the edge of her sound before gradually fading out. It's nice finish showing the pair's joint storytelling and agreeable styles, giving the feel of something even more remarkable than it was unexpected.

Justin Cober-Lake

Zosha Warpeha — Silver Dawn (Relative Pitch)

Zosha Warpeha is a Minnesotan based in Brooklyn, and if you trawl through her social media wake, you’ll find that she runs with an improv crowd. But the sound of Silver Dawn, her solo debut, will point your ears in another direction. She plays a hardanger d’amore, which is a recently devised instrument that combines aspects of the resonant strings of a Norwegian hardanger fiddle with the larger size and lower pitch of the baroque viola d’amore. Instrumentation isn’t exactly destiny, but it’s a strong influence; if you hear its ringing strings and spare lines from the next room, you might think that Silver Dawn is idiomatic Norwegian folk music. But if you listen past the folkloric sonorities, you’ll hear Warpeha breaking things down and seeing what she can do with the parts. It will be interesting to hear where she takes this sound.

Bill Meyer

Why Bother? — Serenading Unwanted Ballads (Feel It)

Why Bother?’s Serenading Unwanted Ballads plays like a fractured survey of 20th century (mostly) underground rock. There’s “Frothy Green (Live Dec. 2020),” roaring with melodic, Husker Du-ian heft or “Heroin Dancer,” which pushes a dead-eyed vocal over deep, menacing surf grooves, like Iggy Pop covering Link Wray’s “Rumble.” “Your Love Will Die” convincingly mines 1960s psychedelic garage rock — it wouldn’t sound out of place on a Nuggets compilation — while the stomping electronic miasma and croaked vocals of “Run from the Sun” (sample lyric: “Total disgrace/has found its place/inside my soul/and it takes control”) could be a long lost David Berman-Ausmuteants project. Without completely (or at all, in the case of “Frothy Green…”) abandoning the rapid drum fills and racing guitars that give the album a hardcore edge, these songs, as well as the glowing, raw-boned goth sounds of “High as the Heavens,” show off the group’s rangy pop chops.

Why Bother? cover a lot of ground here and, like a compilation, it doesn’t always cohere. Still, Serenading Unwanted Ballads, in all its guises, from the bare, bluesy “Testify” to the Minor Threat frenzy of “Feckless World” and New Order fantasy of “Until,” works like an antic, woozy singles collection: a glimpse of everything the band can do.

Alex Johnson

Mars Williams & Tatsu Aoki — Stooping To Talk To a Cat On A Doorstep (Asian Improv)

This album’s title may be cumbersome, but it nicely conveys the music’s vibe. It was recorded at a Chicago arts space where acoustic bassist Tatsu Aoki booked a concert series for a few years. While both he and saxophonist Mars Williams are willing to rumble, they’re also inclined to pause and appreciate the simple poetry of the moment. The two musicians also share a life-long engagement with Chicago’s self-starting, improvisation-informed movements, wherever they might manifest; you can hear them thread between blues reflection, AACM-informed little instrument exploration, solemn ceremonial evocation and wooly extrapolation throughout the album. Sadly, it’s also an invitation to reflect on Williams’ passing in November 2023. While he toured the world with the Psychedelic Furs and Peter Brötzmann, among others, when he came back to Chicago, he played with equal commitment at little storefront gigs like this. Whatever he played, whoever he played with, he was 100% on, and this session is no exception. He is missed.

Bill Meyer

Your Music Encountered in a Dream – David Grubbs and Liam Keenan (Room 40)

Improviser David Grubbs was finishing up a tour of Australia when he and singer/songwriter/guitarist Liam Keenan decided to meet up and record electric guitar duets. Keenan is best known for the first two of the aforementioned hyphenates, but he more than holds his own with Grubbs. “Fallowfield” is built on small pitch cells and tremolando, introduced by Grubbs and then bandied back and forth between the two musicians. They both pick up each other's shifts, even the smallest details, with an impressive seamlessness. “Gemini Cluster” begins with various treatments and repetitions of a single note which is then juxtaposed against a gradual unfolding of other repeated notes and modal harmonies. The recording concludes with “Miracle Bowling Club,” which opens with a memorable riff that eventually is treated as a cresting wave above some serious rocking. Given distance, it might be hard for this fulsome collaboration to continue. Perhaps Grubbs will take another trip down under or, better yet, those of us in the United States might get a visit from Keenan.

Christian Carey

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