#bill mackay & ryley walker

[sinceileftyoublog]

Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly Interview: Knowledge and Dignity

Photo by GUMO

BY JORDAN MAINZER

When I log on Zoom to interview creative and life partners Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti and Frank Rosaly, I expect to see them together. Instead, Ferragutti's at their home in Amsterdam, and Rosaly's camera is set up somewhere outside, but he's not there at all. (The Zoom active speaker view keeps on highlighting him because birds are chirping.) As I introduce myself to Ferragutti, Rosaly eventually shows up, and they explain to me that he's at a house in the forest they share with friends. The contrast between the two locations--personal and internal, earthbound and communal--fittingly mirrors the dichotomy of what I'm there to ask them about, the stunning MESTIZX (International Anthem/Nonesuch). Ferragutti and Rosaly's new album represents the first time either artist publicly confronted aspects of their Latin heritage. It's also their first record at all. Even Rosaly, the prolific experimental music drummer who has played with everyone from indie rock lore like Thurston Moore and Ryley Walker to jazz stalwarts such as Dave Rempis and Matana Roberts, has never made anything that sounds quite like MESTIZX, and only ¡Todos de Pie!, his project exploring the music of Puerto Rico through improvisation, came close to touching the record's layered themes. Nonetheless, Ferragutti and Rosaly have managed to dive deep into complexities while finding a collaborative artistic voice.

The word "mestizx" is a non-gendered word of "mestizo" or "mestiza", the Spanish colonial term for mixed race, an identity the duo owns and turns upside down with MESTIZX. Ferragutti was born in Bolivia and is of Bolivian and Brazilian heritage, countries colonized by Spain and Portugal, respectively. The majority of the modern Bolivian population identifies as "mestizo," a mix of Indigenous and European heritage, of the colonizer and the colonized. It's this in-betweenness that Ferragutti wished to dissect on MESTIZX, a feeling beyond simply growing up with the music of the Bolivian and Brazilian diaspora. Rosaly, meanwhile, is of Puerto Rican heritage but wasn't allowed to speak Spanish outside of his home during childhood, as his parents wished to assimilate him as much as possible to the English-speaking United States. Before he became the dynamic, noisy drummer he was today, he fell in love with percussion and first connected with his roots when watching another drummer of Puerto Rican heritage perform, the late, great Tito Puente. The sounds on MESTIZX touch on all of these musical traditions and more, intensely reflective.

Photo by GUMO

Yet, Ferragutti and Rosaly's approach is also immaculately researched and respectful. Both artists went to school for music; though the songs on MESTIZX are anything but traditional, they reflect Ferragutti and Rosaly's deliberately academic exploration of music-making. They took the time to understand the ritualistic and cosmological context of each included instrument and rhythm before connecting it with modern-day ideas of decolonization and protest via Ferragutti's lyrics. That is, whether it's the impossibly wide array of percussion instruments from all over the world or Ferragutti's synthesizers effected to sound like pan flutes, everything on MESTIZX is included for a reason. "I didn't go thinking on this record, 'I want to use African instruments.'" Rosaly said. "When we were first starting to play around with instruments in the living room and hanging out, the mbira was around, and I came up with this little harmonic sequence, and things started landing on top of that instrument. I had to ask myself, 'I love the sound, of course, but am I using it for reasons that are dignified for the instrument and its lineage without appropriating?" Rosaly studied the way in which the African diaspora was embedded in Puerto Rico. "That musical and spiritual ideology traveled," he said. "Suddenly, the mbira had a place for me."

As much as MESTIZX sounds on paper like an ethnomusicologist's favorite new album--just take a look at the album's immersive liner notes--Ferragutti and Rosaly emphasized to me that the actual qualities of the songs are exemplary of the two's past musical influences and contemporary artistic community. Rosaly's history in the Chicago post-rock and jazz scene shines through, making a song like the album's title track, full of wiry guitars, an orchestra of synthesizers, and Ferragutti's captivating vocals, earn its pitched-to-me would-be-ridiculous descriptor of "Elza Soares fronting Hail To The Thief-era Radiohead." Moreover, on each song, the two solicited contributions from a who's who of contemporary experimental musicians, from bassist Matt Lux and cornetist Ben LaMar Gay to guitarist Bill MacKay and multi-instrumentalist Rob Frye. It's a testament to the collective's creativity how natural, often groovy, and cohesive the songs sound, despite each's long list of players, many of whom play multiple instruments per tune. On lead single "DESTEJER", Ferragutti differentiates between being intertwined with her roots and being suffocated by them, singing, translated from Spanish, "The present conjures the past that informs the future / I dodge the trap / I am not raw material." Her words form a push-pull with the clattering percussion, courtesy of Rosaly and Mikel Patrick Avery's tambourine and caxixi, and the woodwinds that alternate between flutters and smooth expressions, demonstrating the tension within.

Ultimately, the next step for Ferragutti and Rosaly is where the songs on MESTIZX go from here. Right now, they're exploring them in a live setting, on tour in Europe with Lux, Gay, multi-instrumentalist Ben Boye, and pianist Marta Warelis. Before embarking on tour, the two rehearsed simplified versions of the songs themselves, but just like the record, the songs will become fully fleshed only when the duo invites their friends on stage to help them along the way, participating in the modern-day ritual of playing music, a full circle return to the rituals Ferraguti and Rosaly studied to prepare to make the album. "The medium of the record is one thing, and songs need to be certain lengths for them to stay buoyant," Rosaly said. "Having a whole family of magical people we can tour with in different contexts, the music is going to open up in very unforeseen ways."

Below, read my conversation with Ferragutti and Rosaly, edited for length and clarity. We talk about MESTIZX, the album's art and videos, roots, colonialism, and Chicago post-rock.

Since I Left You: Reading about the ideas and story behind MESTIZX, it's clear the issues of identity it deals with are things the two of you have been grappling with for a long time. Why was right now the time you decided to sit down and make this album?

Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti: In my case, it's been something I've been dealing with my whole life. I've felt a super loud presence of my roots and realized not everybody where I come from had that. It was almost a burden, a curse. [laughs] But also totally not and really beautiful. It had a big influence in a good way and sometimes in not such a nice way, to the point I had to do something with it. I didn't know exactly what ["it"] was, so I let it go, but the moment I really faced ["it"] through music, I allowed for a lot of healing in terms of my relationship to my roots, the painful parts of my roots, and the beautiful parts of my roots. I also [have] a lot of connection with people, rhythms, and the pain of what it is to come from places so deeply colonized.

I just read an article that somebody wrote in Germany [about MESTIZX], and they called it a bit of a self-help record. [laughs] I don't know, I think it's more than that for me. It's not just about me. It's about something we share as a collective intelligence, where we're at in this moment, in the South American diaspora.

Frank Rosaly: [Self-help] sounds like a bit of a simplification of the context of the record. I started thinking about this stuff around 2006. I had a pretty disconnected relationship with Puerto Rico, by design. My parents kept me as integrated as possible to my benefit. I don't necessarily identify as being Puerto Rican outright. When Ibelisse and I met and began our partnership, being in partnership with a Latina really opened a dialog that was never really so open in my life. That's when things really shifted into high gear in dealing with some of the themes you hear about on this record.

SILY: What about during the process of writing or recording or playing with others? Did your relationship to your roots change?

FR: For me, it deepened things. Since Ibelisse is the guardian of the lyrics, and I'm oversimplifying things here, but I'm creating content from the musical side of things--we're both doing that of course--the rhythms that come from certain regions and all of my research, studies, and interest in that material had a place. Before that, playing with Ryley Walker, it didn't make sense to throw some bomba in there. All of a sudden, this incredible amount of something from within became dislodged and able to move through me and the music, that I hadn't given a lot of space for. I've only been in one project that I created myself, ¡Todos de Pie!, that began to talk about this and research this a bit. This project really set it all free, and it became a waterfall.

IGF: For me, I think it was a really beautiful and intense process, to confront my own biases. I studied classical piano, have done a lot of punk music, and realized in my education, by default, even growing up in South America, I wasn't in contact with the music of the territory, with the real roots. The process of this music was so deep that I started talking with a lot of people and doing a lot of research about how much by design you are already given this very Western idea of listening to, making, and belonging to music. I felt so sad that in my country, we never had enough power to appreciate what we already had there. It's stunning, the most beautiful drum music I've ever heard. It sounds self-helpy, but it's not: It was a big healing process of reconnecting with deeper layers of instruments that belong to a territory. Pan flute, I just see it in the main squares, people playing it in the street, but it's actually a very powerful instrument when put in its right context for its right ritual and purpose. For me, it was a really big journey to go really deep and really dare to listen to things I couldn't listen to before. Even if I don't use the pan flutes, to have a reverence for where my ancestors come from and have a space to listen. The magic embedded in those rituals is out of this world. It's like they're people from the stars. I can't explain the whole thing--it's like a whole book--but I was so stunned by the cosmologies of the people from those territories. This record brought me there, and I'm very, very thankful for that.

SILY: Your average music listener might not think about the fact that an instrument, rhythm, or sound can have its own proper sociohistorical context independent of the sheer quality of how it sounds. Were you hoping to further educate listeners with this record?

FR: I wouldn't go as far as to say "educate." At the end of "BARRO", there's panderetas being played, and it's not some sort of reference or a shoutout, as in, "Here's a little Puerto Rican tidbit." It really has a place in the song because of what the song is talking about and what we're trying to invoke. I found it imperative; there's an urgency for that to happen. When we started making the record, we weren't trying to make a Latin-feeling record--we both tend to make pretty noisy, experimental stuff--but because of the content of the record and what's really happening inside of the music, it informed us to make a different decision as to how the music can be carried by song, flow from song to song, to make a record and an entire story. I've never thought this deeply about all the connective tissue and the meaning of everything on this record. Nothing is put in place, like, "A shaker would be nice!" A shaker is there because it really needs to be there, not just on a musical level, but because of the message.

IGF: I feel like I am a bit more educated; I'm going to start by educating myself. I can communicate to other people. I don't feel like I'm allowed to play a pan flute or anything like that. I know much more now than what I knew before, but that knowledge and dignity I felt making the record is embedded in the music by default, by the way I talk about things, choose this word or that sound. It has to do with a repercussion of understanding the dignity of those instruments in the territories they are made and played: agricultural reasons, cosmological reasons. That knowledge is so inspiring, it helped me decide how to make this record. The record is a reflection of what I learned.

SILY: What determined what language each song was in?

IGF: I think it had to do with the sound. We built "MESTIZX" like a singer-songwriter [song,] and it just came out in Spanish, naturally. Some songs started from the lyrics towards the instrument, others from the drums towards words. At a certain point--and with the help of Frank--I was listening so openly, the song would tell you what language it needed to be sung in. “SABER DO MAR”, the second song of side B, is often translated in the reviews as "Know the Sea", but it's actually "The Knowledge of the Sea". I was thinking that all of these people came from the Africas to Brazil and informed so much music and brought their instruments, gods, and belief systems. I was really inspired by the language carried in that diaspora between Africa and Brazil, which is the colonizer language, which is Portuguese. The sea brought all of these languages to Brazil, and to Bolivia. The last two [songs] in English...I think it has something to do with this "mestizx" thing. I communicate nowadays in English rather than in Spanish or Portuguese. I didn't grow up with it, but I use it so much it's embedded in how I think, how I feel, how I communicate with my love, Frankie. We just communicate in English. Frankie doesn't understand Spanish or Portuguese, so English is our bridge. English is a powerful medium for this record, in terms of all of the voices that live within us.

Photo by Saskia Ludden

SILY: Frank, in terms of music where you come from, how would you say Chicago post-rock informed this record?

FR: I would argue that the fabric of how I think about playing is woven almost strictly from my experiences in Chicago and the music that brought me there in the first place, which dislodged me from a weird path of institutional jazz learning and going to school. I heard Sam Prekop's first solo record with Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams, then I heard Isotope 217, then Tortoise. I was in Arizona at the time, then I moved to L.A. for a while. I was really in a bubble before that. Suddenly, everything changed because of that sound. It's not any particular artist. They've all influenced me in so many ways. Not necessarily, "I'm going to play like Dan Bitney now because I love that sound," but the principal of how Dan Bitney fits in Tortoise, and how John Herndon sounds in Isotope, and the melodies that Rob Mazurek makes. [Mazurek] plays a lot of intervals in 4ths, which I fell in love with when I was in college composing, but then I was exposed to it in a new context which made me crazy. You hear 4ths everywhere in this record, which is because of Charles Ives by way of Rob Mazurek by way of Gastr del Sol and the free jazz and improvisational lineage from Chicago, from the Art Ensemble of Chicago to what's happening even now. It's all in there.

SILY: From a broad perspective, there seems to be a contrast in textures and moods in every song. Was that a goal, to have tactile instrumentation going on at the same time as something broad and expansive?

IGF: From my point of view, I don't know if it was a strategy as much as my listening inside the moment, which is of course a strategy. [laughs] For me, playing with synthesizers is a really nice way to speculate folkloric instruments. I would tune the synthesizer in different ways to make it have the same tuning as a pan flute. The electricity of the synthesizer had to be there because it's a medium that makes a lot of sense to tie the ancestral with the futuristic, to break through space and time. I was also thinking about whether I should sing or use words because [that way is] less post-rocky--I'm also super inspired by post-rock [laughs]--there was something bigger happening in terms of the palette of the sounds. My voice became a kind of instrument, so to say.

FR: I would argue another part of how I think about things has so much to do with that old version of myself when I was in school, learning about classical percussion and the percussion family. It's such an incredibly huge family of instruments that span across the world. They're all a part of my life, because I've studied them and they mean something to me. If I [use] a pandeiro from Brazil, it's not necessarily just because Ibelisse is speaking in Portuguese, or because it has anything to do with Brazil, but because it's the right sound.

SILY: Did you have specific people in mind you wanted to play on certain songs on the record?

FR: The first person we were thinking about was Matt Lux, because of his sound. I had worked with him on another project where he was the producer. The way he thinks about sound and very gently produces--he just says a few things and lets it sink in--he has a way of being very subtle about helping artists like Ibelisse and I move deeper into the music. We just wanted him around and then said, "Dude, you gotta bring your bass and play a little bit." He had always joked about being in retirement. Luckily, that's not the case. The last time I was in Chicago, I was supposed to do a recording session with Rob Frye and Ben LaMar Gay, and I got really ill. I really love their sound, [so I asked them]. Bill MacKay, I love that guy so much, he's been such a huge inspiration as a human being, let alone a musician, so we wanted to see whether he could arrive and play a few notes.

IGF: We also had some songs with guitar and thought his sound was really unbelievable. Avreeayl Ra is really amazing. Mikel Patrick Avery. There are so many.

SILY: Bill got to play requinto on "SABER DO MAR". I don't think I've heard him play that instrument on record since his album with Ryley Walker years ago.

FR: It's a beautiful sound. He really understood the depth of the music. He speaks Spanish and Portuguese really well.

IGF: We were at Into the Great Wide Open with Ryley, and Bill was there, and he started talking to me in Spanish and Portuguese!

FR: I would be remiss not to mention Chris Doyle, who lives in Amsterdam. He used to be in Antibalas and was in the scene in New York City, roommates with Jaimie Branch for a long time. We are dear friends and play in a few different projects together. He swooped in at the last minute and added some layers that only he could manage, because he's such an incredible musician and really subtle thinker. I would argue he's a producer in the way he added the tiniest touches of beauty that opened things up a little bit more, gave them more air, even though he was adding layers. Mikel Patrick Avery was visiting Amsterdam, and I just asked him to do a couple overdubs because of his feel and sound. He'll just take a toy tambourine and do something smooth as butter, even though that sounds corny.

IGF: There was a community aspect. [Avery] came to visit when we were at International Anthem, and we said, "Don't you want to play some congas or something?" [laughs] It worked out super well. The community aspect is similar to [that] where I come from.

FR: These are all people we're deeply in love with. We wanted that to be embedded in the music, that it's really coming from a place of love and sharing ideas together from a loving place.

SILY: Can you tell me about the history of the voice memo included on "BLESS THEE MUNDANE"?

IGF: Viktor [Le Givens]. [laughs]

RF: I didn't know him very well when I lived in Chicago, but there was a series that I ran at the Skylark in Pilsen for about 8 years with Nick Mazzarella and Anton Hatwich. It originally started with me and Jaimie Branch, but then she moved away. Viktor would come to some shows occasionally. I think he was going to Columbia at the time. He's been this character that orbits my consciousness often. Suddenly, I hear that Ibelisse is this festival in The Hague, and she sees this magical guy doing this thing with Angel Bat Dawid. I was like, "I know this guy!" I started following him on Instagram. This work he does is incredible. It's this beautiful archive of The Great Migration. It's stunning, the way he talks and thinks and presents. I kind of have a little bit of a man crush on him. I started sending him messages about his posts and watching his live feeds religiously for a while. We started exchanging voice messages, and I was telling him while Ibelisse and I were in the midst of making a record, we were busy with really small minor details, really mundane stuff, and he sent this message. It was like, "Uhh...right. Only Viktor could [take] something I was really struggling with and give it life and context." It was super inspiring for me, so I asked him if it was okay to use the voice memo for that conversation.

SILY: How involved were you in the visual identity of the record?

FR: The record cover, I kind of designed it.

IGF: [laughs]

FR: I didn't take the photo or anything like that, but I used Pages to design the [linework.] That came together pretty quickly based on something I drew up.

IGF: We were in Bolivia when we did [the album photos.] We wanted to have a couple amazing friends, photographers and visual artists--and I really wanted to have South American artists--involved in the images. A friend of mine took the pictures, and we went to a very beautiful mountain where I grew up, and to the market, these very crazy places in Bolivia. We did make a mood-board to guide our friend of how it could be, more or less. Not in all of the pictures, but in the cover picture, he really captured something we were longing for. It's full of the world around you, the territories that were talking to us so loudly. For the [video] for "DESTEJER", I asked someone in Bolivia who I didn't know but who I had been following for a while, [Espectador Domesticado]. The concept behind the concept, in Cochabamba, the lake, was, "How does the new generation perceive this music?" We talk all the time about ancestors and the past, but I also want to think about the future. These are ancestors of the future, 23 years old. So we did develop a little bit together, but I gave [the director] a lot of freedom to interpret the territory the way he wanted. We did help him with edits, but I left as much space as possible for his voice.

FR: For "TURBULÊNCIA", we were thinking, "We need to put out another single. Should we make a video? Should we?" Ibelisse and I are part of a collective called Molk Factory, and one of our collective members who is a wonderful video artist who works with projection and light, we asked her whether she wanted to make a video with us real quick. We added some ideas between all of us and came up with the idea of using very open space with movers and dancers. We wanted to deal with the dissonance of what the song is talking about. We wanted to tear apart or unweave, if I can use that word--

IGF: Destejer. [laughs]

FR: Destejer. We very quickly put the task at hand. "Let's mix this video." We filmed it in about 10-12 hours with the help of Marc Riordan, who used to live in Chicago. Incredible drummer, incredible pianist, and now he's really busy with a film living in L.A. He was visiting to play some shows with me and was the main camera operator, which is such a blessing because he's really good at thinking about cameras and how all of that works, because I have no idea. Within a 24-hour period of actual time, that video was formed. It was playful, immediate. We didn't think about too hard. It just came out. We were really happy with it.

IGF: The tricky part is it had digital post-production. When does digital [manipulation] become a response to what we were saying, not just a trick, but serve something more than a trick or a gimmick? It was a bit of a conversation with [director] Noralie [van den Eijnde], because it's called "TURBULÊNCIA", or "turbulence," with things out of control sometimes. How do we listen, and how do we use our hands to carve a new knowing together? Who is giving me the voice, and is that why the hands are moving my face? Is that the ancestors? This counterpoint between who is moving who: Is something moving the body, or is the body open enough to be losing its shape?

SILY: It's the colonizer versus the colonized, external forces affecting our perspective of things versus something more internal.

IGF: I think you're right. At some point, it's taking ownership of these two forces--the duality--and what do you do with it after just being the victim of it. "DESTEJER" was the opposite. We perform, we read the music, and there was this amazing rhythm happening, but we're just looking at the water really quietly. We were totally ADHD and wanting things to happen, but the filmmaker was like, "No! Everything is already happening in the forest, in the lake, in the water." We just had to listen and be there. Both videos are totally different, but in a way, they're totally similar in the essence of making yourself available and take ownership of the things that live within you while dealing with them and their contradictions.

Tour dates:

5/30: de Doelen, Rotterdam, NL

5/31: Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam, NL

6/1: C.A.L.L. F.E.S.T.I.V.A.L., Amsterdam, NL*

6/3: Kampnagel, Hamburg, DE

6/4: 90mil, Berlin, DE

6/6: Stadtgarten, Köln, DE

6/7: Church of Sound, London, UK

6/8: Pabfest, Île de Batz, FR

*Members of the MESTIZX band perform

[greyssquare]

Ryley walker bill mackay

As ever, the single 44-minute track is immersive those coming to The Necks for a transcendent mindfulness session, however, may find it distinctly unnerving in places. But “Vertigo” is a hairier experience, in which the band’s trademark grid of recurring phrases and silences is augmented by ominous drones and some explosive percussive disruptions. Their 2013 abum “Open”, at once serene and compelling, provided a useful entry point for newcomers to the Necks’ music. If you haven’t encountered The Necks thus far into their 25-year career ( here’s one of the last things I wrote about them), the Australian trio have become one of the most critically revered bands on the planet, renowned for their epic live improvisations and a back catalogue that exists in a rarefied interzone between jazz and ambient music (pianist Chirs Abrahams, incidentally, might be familiar to a few of you who’ve studied the small print on Triffids sleeves at some point in the past). “Vertigo”, their relatively fraught 18 th album, has at least provided some succour. I’ve had to miss an aggravating number of live shows these past few weeks, not least among them the Necks’ residency at Café Oto over the weekend. As a respite, though, it gives me the opportunity to round up reviews of a few albums I’ve liked a lot over the past couple of months. It’s one of those rare weeks when I don’t have a new magazine to flog you (though of course we have an enriching range of Uncuts, Ultimate Music Guides and History Of Rocks if you’re short of something to read).

[jetjust]

Ryley walker bill mackay

Songs run the gamut from fingerstyle ballads to psychedelic waltzes and raga-inspired blues. Land of Plenty is completely instrumental and falls somewhere between Ryley Walker’s acclaimed new album, Primrose Green (Dead Oceans), and Bill MacKay’s highly melodic work in Darts & Arrows. Alex Inglizian of Experimental Sound Studios recorded the final two shows of the residency and Erik Hall (In Tall Buildings, Wild Belle) mixed the seven tracks that comprise Land of Plenty. Each week, songs took on new shapes, while others were written and added to the always-evolving set list. The overall spirit of the residency was that of a creative workshop producing music that ran in directions as wide as the duo’s interests. In January 2015, Bill and Ryley took up a month-long, Friday night residency at The Whistler, a live music venue/gallery/record label in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Over the course of the year, an impressive repertoire of new songs and ideas coalesced. The duo quickly developed their own musical vocabulary and the resulting sounds drew on traditional folk music from Appalachia to Northern India, as well as jazz and blues. They soon began meeting at Bill’s southwest Chicago home to write and improvise together on their lived-in dreadnought 6-string guitars, with Ryley's 12-string and Bill's requinto making frequent appearances as the year wore on. Chicago-based guitarists Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker met in January 2014 at a friend’s birthday party where they discovered a mutual admiration for Albert King, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Ali Akbar Khan and Jimi Hendrix.

[dustedmagazine]

Bill MacKay — Locust Land (Drag City)

Photo by Yvette Dostatni

It can be hard to keep up with all of Chicago guitarist Bill MacKay’s musical comings and goings. It’s important to note, though, that he’s been involved in a couple of my most beloved records of recent years: Ryley Walker’s Course In Fable (2021), which featured MacKay on electric guitar, and BCMC’s Foreign Smokes (2023), his atmospheric instrumental duo with Cooper Crain. Needless to say, the release of new MacKay music is worth heeding to those in the know.

Locust Land is an understated, intermittently lovely series of musical miniatures that sets modest parameters and then pushes playfully against them. The opening two songs offer an overview of the landscape at play. “Phantasmic Fairy” is an eerie instrumental tiptoe through the wardrobe of the imagination, tracing out icy figures on organ and electric guitar that hang suspended precariously. The chill immediately thaws on “Keeping In Time,” a glowing folk tune with both acoustic guitar and the background growl of an overdriven electric, introducing MacKay’s voice for the first time on the record (it crops up a couple more times on “Half of You” and “When I Was Here”). His vocal timbre is at times reminiscent of the yearning purity of James Taylor, but also the rough-hewn, off-the-cuff feel of labelmate Jim O’Rourke.

“Glow Drift” is the kind of upbeat instrumental you can imagine soundtracking a TV series about off-road driving, the guitar lines smartly harking back to the preceding song’s vocal melody. “Half of You” and “Oh Pearl” comprise the most loosely defined stretch on the album, and for a nine-song, half-hour record, this loss of focus is noticeable. “Half of You” has a hazy, Sunday-afternoon charm, but the on-the-nose lyrics feel like they could have used another pass, and while “Oh Pearl” introduces a couple of nice chord changes, it meanders a little and peters out towards the end.

“Radiator” is grounded by the pulse of Sam Wagster’s bass, against which two electric guitar lines and organ weave a glowing lattice, harking back to “Glow Drift”’s radiant palette. Then it feels like the album reaches its apex with “When I Was Here,” all of the record’s musical ideas coalescing into a single anthemic moment. “Neil’s Field” is a short, atmospheric vignette woven from female vocals and organ, before the closing title track’s theme resounds on piano, organ and multiple guitars.

Having listened to Locust Land a dozen times, I still don’t have a clear sense of what Locust Land is. But I do know it’s a beautiful place to visit, and I’m willing to trust MacKay as my tour guide for whatever musical ramble he has planned next.

Tim Clarke

[kntn]

Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker

Land of Plenty

[woodencup]

TenTenFromTensEp8

https://www.mixcloud.com/woodencup/tentenfromten-episode-eight/

White Fence - Anger! Who Keeps You Under Yak - Hungry Heart Nadia Reid - Call The Days Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker - Land of Plenty Thee Oh Sees - Web Beak> - Brean Down Other Lives - For 12 PICKWICK - Lady Luck (feat. Sharon Van Etten) Deerhunter - Snakeskin Mac Demarco - Rock and Roll Night Club

[wybmf]

Ryley Walker and Bill MacKay (2017)

[nofatclips]

In Castle Dome by Ryley Walker from the album Deafman Glance

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker - Jerry's On Front, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 19, 2018

From a couple of nights ago — Jesse Sheppard’s evocative b&w video of Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker’s Philly set. The tunes are drawn from the duo’s two excellent LPs, but they take them into some excitingly heady free-form zones. Totally nice. And hey, Mr. Walker is hitting the road again soon in support of latest/greatest release Deafman Glance. Go see him, for heaven’s sake. 

[rockandrollposters]

[sinceileftyoublog]

Ryley Walker Interview: The Truest Form

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Earlier this month, headlining the Empty Bottle’s fall block party, Ryley Walker joked, “How far did they have to go for me to headline?” to a crowd of fans who loved him for his banter just as much as his playing. “Osees weren’t available?” Funny enough, the music ended up just as raucous as those San Francisco psych rockers. Walker played with a band made up of guitarist Bill Mackay, bassist Andrew Scott Young (two main contributors to April’s Course In Fable, his first LP released on his own label husky pants records), and drummer Quin Kircher. They brought an immediately fried, buzzy vibe on “Striking Down Your Big Premiere”, Walker and MacKay in tune with their solos, and cooled off with the limber, gentle “Rang Dizzy”. And in revisiting his older catalog, Walker went full-on indie jam (Deafman Glance’s “Opposite Middle”), prog (“Telluride Speed”), and prog-folk (Golden Sings That Have Been Sung’s “The Halfwit In Me). It was simultaneously the most technically impressive and loosest I’ve ever seen Walker, the same combination that renders Course In Fable his best album to date.

Working with heavyweights like Tortoise’s John McEntire and string musician Douglas Jenkins (who provided all the string arrangements on the record), Walker’s latest is his most confident record. Though it’s rife with the same self-deprecating humor and references to past drug binges as his legendary Twitter account, Course In Fable sports positive vibes, especially in the dynamism of the instrumentation. The wonderfully titled one-take “A Lenticular Slap” jams for a couple minutes before going into its verses and swaying chorus, circular guitar rhythms atop mathy stop-starts. Tempos change amiably on the skronking “Axis Bent” and jazzy “Clad With Bunk”, Walker letting out a “woo!” on the latter to introduce serious riffing. 

The start-to-finish Course In Fable must have been similar to what the Empty Bottle set was to Walker and his band: forward, fast-charging, and fun. It was demoed in Chicago last June and recorded a year ago in Portland, Walker driving across the country in two days by himself. (He listened to the audiobook of NOFX’s autobiography during the drive.) And when it came time to release the record, Walker, whose contract with Dead Oceans had run out, chose his own label. While at this point, husky pants is home to albums by Chicago’s Luggage and Mukqs, an upcoming record from al Riggs, and Walker’s collaboration with one of his musical heroes, Gastr del Sol’s David Grubbs, in April, it was by far the label’s biggest release yet. Judging by its current roster, the risk to self-release paid off.

I spoke to Walker over the phone from his apartment in Manhattan earlier this year before Course In Fable was released. His sense of calm and optimism, even in the face of a world full of darkness, was apparent and seems to have served him well in a year that’s culminating in him finally playing his new songs live again. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: What made you want to start your own label after being on Dead Oceans for a long time?

Ryley Walker: My contract ran up on Dead Oceans, and there were options to go back or find a new label, but I needed a job. There’s no beef with any label or any falling out story or fodder for the readers. I’m just happy to take it on my own, on my own timeline, and keep it close to the chest. It’s a nice challenge. It’s a lot more work, but I really enjoy it. For years, I kind of just coasted on hiring people to do all the work for me, but I’m in a position now to take that on and do a somewhat good job at it.

SILY: You’re releasing records for others, too. Some old friends.

RW: That’s kind of the goal, and why any label starts. “I guess I’ll do this myself and hope it works.” So far, it’s working okay. I haven’t hit any big snags yet, and I’m sure those will come in the future, but it’s really rewarding to put out music by friends and stuff I enjoy.

SILY: What about Course in Fable is unique as compared to all of your other records?

RW: Every other record is kind of a growth period of figuring things out, but I like to think I’ve settled into a sound I can dial into. That comes a lot from [drummer] Ryan [Jewell] and Bill and Andrew and all of the chemistry we had together. It’s all influenced by those Drag City and Thrill Jockey bands, and that’s the music I’ve always loved and wanted to make. I’m older, I get an ego, I lose an ego. I’d like to think this is the truest form of any record I’ve made, and I’ve gotten better at writing lyrics and playing guitar. I was a lot more calculated in how I record and more prepared than I’ve ever been. Previous records have often been songs with half-baked ideas, but this was fully ready to go with demos and words. It was very efficient. We got in and got out and there wasn’t so much guesswork.

SILY: It seems like for a while, each record was a reaction to the past one, trying to stray from it. This one seems like a logical next step from Deafman Glance. Has your relationship with your past material changed a lot over time?

RW: I don’t think about it too much. I wouldn’t want to do the same things I did on the old English folk-inspired records. Those are cool, but I wouldn’t do that again. I don’t think they’re bad, necessarily, but it was a pastiche, fan dedication era. I still do that now; I’m still a big fan of music and have a lot of carbon copies of things I enjoy.

SILY: At what point did you realize you wanted to work with John McEntire for this record?

RW: That was something I wanted to do when I was 15 years old. I knew John in Chicago before he lived in Portland. We weren’t good friends or anything, but we were friendly, and by friendly I mean I would corner him at [Chicago dive bar] Rainbo [Club] and be like [voice cracks] “Oh man, I love you, I’m a big fan!” I reached out to him at some point early last year. There were a couple options I had in mind, but he makes everything sound so good, and to have his print on the record would be amazing. And it was! He was really cool. It was one of the smoothest, most fun sessions I had, and he had a lot to do with how the music sounds. I’m really grateful for it.

SILY: The other collaborator that really stands out to me is Douglas Jenkins. These string arrangements are decidedly different than any strings on your previous albums. They conjure so many of the album’s different moods. How did you get in touch with him and decide you wanted to work with him?

RW: That was the recommendation of John. Douglas and John had worked together on a bunch of stuff. Douglas lives in Portland, too. I didn’t know who he was or any of his work before, so when we came out of the mixing, John said, “I want to add strings to a bunch of this stuff.” 

SILY: I first heard Douglas’s work on Jolie Holland's Wine Dark Sea, so when I saw his name, I thought, “Unexpected, but cool!”

RW: At first, I wasn’t really open to the idea. I wanted it to be this barebones rock record with guitars and drums, but I’m really glad I had a bit of humility to listen to John because I think it adds so much to the music.

SILY: What made you want to release “Rang Dizzy” as the first single?

RW: I guess it’s the most digestible song on the record. There were a couple other ideas, but it’s a nice intro to the record without giving away the whole thing. My thought process going into it was, “It’s an easy 4-minute folk guitar song that I guess will grab a listener.” But there’s a lot more crazy shit on the record that I didn’t want to give away, so I gave them the appetizers. I brought the mozzarella sticks out for the buffalo burger with fries basket.

SILY: It does seem to cover a lot of the lyrical ground you explore on the record. Words about being alive but also losing your shit.

RW: Yeah, so that encapsulates a good serving of the whole thing. 

SILY: How did you decide upon the sequencing?

RW: I think we recorded it in this order. I had a sequence worked out, which is a good thing about being prepared. I had the home demos on a 4-track, and then the band demos, and I figured out the sequence then. Starting big with a track like “Striking Down Your Big Premiere” is like [New York accent] “What the fuck is up? Welcome to the record.” And then it goes through those peaks and valleys. I like records that don’t have a totally dead middle. It kind of goes up and down and ends on a high note, so you don’t end with a total downer song. 

SILY: The title’s taken from the first words of “Axis Bent”. What made you want to title the record Course in Fable?

RW: That song was originally called “Course in Fable”, but I didn’t want to have an album with a title track, so I called it “Axis Bent”. The way I write words is all oddball poetry. Mixed and matched couplets. Any sort of overarching theme or story arc to the songs is totally unintentional, but I guess it works out at the end. It’s all these little samples from a super fried buffet of words I have, and I stitch them together. “Course in fable” was just something I wrote. I can’t really grasp a deeper meaning. If somebody wants to take what they can from it, that’s totally up to them, but it’s not a direct message. I don’t know, “course in fable,” [i.e.] “Here’s how to bullshit?”

SILY: I love songs about songwriting, and that seems to be what “Axis Bent” encapsulates. I don’t know if I’m off there...

RW: No, you’re not reaching at all. They’re all personal words that come from a personal place. I don’t have the answers to anything. I just know the way it comes out is how it works for me. I don’t want to seem like I take myself too seriously.

SILY: There’s no concrete narrative arc, but to what extent do these songs refer to real things that have happened or real moments in your life?

RW: Yeah, there’s talk about crack in there and stuff. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a crack binge or two in my life. [laughs] I think it’s a happy record. Self-deprecating, but generally happy.

SILY: Even some of the darkest moments, like on “Pond Scum Ocean”, when you sing, “Jump into pond scum oceans / I can’t wait until I die / walk a victory lap around whale shit tombs,” you can’t help but laugh. Many times on the record, you’re referring to a low place in a funny way.

RW: That’s how I’ve always dealt with it. I’m not living in denial or anything. It’s some sort of therapy and living in the solution and the present more and more.

SILY: How much of the jamming on here was improvised?

RW: The beginning of “Pond Scum Ocean” was the only jammy, improvised part. The rest of it is pretty written out and calculated. Bill’s guitar solos on the record are pretty different from take to take, but generally the whole thing was pretty written in stone. The intro to “Pond Scum Ocean” was taken from a crazy half hour jam. We cut up the best bits from it and put it at the beginning of the song.

SILY: What’s the story behind the album art?

RW: It’s by this painter named Jenny Nelson. She lives in upstate New York. I’m just a fan of her work. She makes these abstract oil paintings and water colors. I always loved the album art for Gastr del Sol and David Grubbs albums; it was always these abstract paintings. I hate looking at myself on the record cover and trying to sell myself as cool. [laughs] I like abstract art. It’s the only visual art I’m drawn to. I’m not a critic and don’t know anything about art, but it’s what I like. Jenny did a great job.

Course In Fable by Ryley Walker

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Shows! Shows! Shows! (5/21-5/27/18)

One of those quality over quantity weeks. Here is your semi-comprehensive list of Chicago alt-country and Americana shows this week. 

5/22: Shakey Graves @ Vic Theatre ($28 / SOLD OUT)

5/23: ★ Brett Naucke: The Mansion, ★ Bill Mackay & Ryley Walker ★ @ Constellation ($10) An excellent show featuring one of the most wonderful duos in Chicago. Bill Mackay & Ryley Walker transport you elsewhere with their pastoral fingerstyle guitar compositions. Brett Naucke brings experimental and impressionistic sounds that capture the sounds and memories of his childhood home, combining sound collage and synth elements to create haunting atmospheres. Highly recommended.

5/24: ★ Devil in a Woodpile @ Hideout ($5 at the door / 6 PM) Devil in a Woodpile continue their Hideout residency in their penultimate performance for the month. Always a wonderful time, every week brings something different.

5/24: Southern Culture On The Skids @ Schuba’s

5/25: ★ Leo Kottke @ SPACE ($30-65) The legendary fingerstyle guitarist brings his Fahey-esque melodies to Evanston. This show along with the Bill Mackay & Ryley Walker shows combine for an exquisite pair of American Primitive evenings.

5/25: ★★ Honky Tonk Night: Los Gallos, Cass Cwik & Hot Bologna, St. Marlboro @ Co-Prosperity Sphere ($5) Three great locals in one of the best rooms in the city. A must see.

The Not-Country Pick of the Week: 5/26 - Sen Morimoto (Record Release) @ Empty Bottle ($8)

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Black Duck—S-T (Thrill Jockey)

Photo by Evan Jenkins

Black Duck by Black Duck

Chicago is the kind of town where it sometimes seems that everyone has played with everyone else, and indeed within and even across genres including jazz, post-rock, improvised music, folk, blues, electronics and even contemporary classical music, cross pollination proliferates. So it is not exactly surprising to see two Ryley Walker duet partners join forces with a Tortoise founder, who has himself, at times, played with both of them, and in more than one project. Black Duck might be an enduring musical undertaking or a one-off permutation of the Windy City’s considerable talent pool. Either way, it’s a winner.

To be specific, Black Duck is made up of Bill MacKay, Doug McCombs and Charles Rumback, all three of them artists whose work ranges across genres and puts them into contact with each other in a variety of contexts. Just for instance, when I went to see Meg Baird in Chicago last year, Doug McCombs was playing in her band as well as Chris Forsyth’s outfit, and Bill MacKay stood just off stage waiting to be called up by Forsyth. Rumback wasn’t there that night, but you get the idea. Bands are a fluid thing in Chicago.

MacKay’s main instrument is guitar—and his playing ranges from finger-picked folk to raging electric distortion to eerily beautiful slide. McCombs is best known for playing bass in Tortoise, for his multi-instrumental work in Brokeback and for turning up whenever musicians need help finding a groove. Rumback is a drummer with a background in jazz and a strong melodic sense; in his duets with Ryley Walker, he served as an equal partner, driving the song forward as much as the guitarist. In Black Duck, they draw on many different aspects of their respective, eclectic backgrounds, flitting freely from sun-drenched cosmic country, to driving kraut rock, to radiant, enveloping ambiences, all played so expertly that it seems effortless, though it probably isn’t.

Consider, for instance, “Of the Lit Back Yards, the trippy country daydream that kicks off the album, brushes shuffling, bass grumbling, guitar dripping unhurried sweetness. If a roadhouse bar band died and went to heaven, it might sound a lot like this. It has almost nothing in common with the driving blues vamp that powers “Delivery,” bass line licking flames around a motorik beat, and yet the two sit comfortably one track away from one other in the sequencing. What’s between them is even more incongruous, the shivering atmospheres and rolling thunder of “Foothill Daze” (oh, hey, there’s that unearthly slide I was talking about). And yet different as these tracks are, they fit together in a strange surreal way, like the soundtrack to a movie you don’t quite understand, and they are undeniably beautiful.

To my ears, “Lemon Treasure,” near the end, does the best job at bringing all these different elements together. It pulses like a locomotive. It dreams like a lotus eater. It lets notes of soap bubble delicacy bloom alongside rough-riding rhythms. It’s an irresistible groove and an opium vision, and when you think about it, who else could have made this track? These three guys, that’s who. Long live Black Duck.

Jennifer Kelly

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I got this flyer at the local record store today.  It uses Davis Meltzer’s cover art for the 1972 Ace paperback edition of Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick.