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dustedmagazine · 9 months

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Dust Volume 9, Number 12

James Elkington

Last Dust of the year and, holy cow, next year will be a whole decade since we started. We’re working with a bit of skeleton crew this time because of the holidays, but still managed to take in a broad spectrum of music, from famous novelists on holiday to monochord droners to surprisingly joyful takes on saudade. Dusted writers who shrugged off Christmas shopping, wrapping and general festivity long enough to write included Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Ian Mathers and Bryon Hayes. Happy new year and see you in 2024.

Gabriel Birnbaum—Nightwater/all the dead do is dream (Western Vinyl)

Gabriel Birnbaum, leader of the indie band Wilder Maker and one-time saxophonist in the ethio-jazz Debo Band, started making music on a Tascam four-track during the pandemic. It was, at first, a way to keep busy, to keep the dread at bay, but it evolved into a regular meditative practice and, eventually, a public-facing recording project, now releasing on the esteemed Western Vinyl imprint. This second release under the Nightwater banner is, as all that history suggests, a serene and unruffled piece of work, using mostly synthetic textures but also incorporating some rougher, more organic sounds. “above a forest with a house that’s on fire” pulses with bright keyboard tones that blow up unexpectedly into dissonance periodically. It moves deliberately, placidly, from here to there, letting sustained tones linger over insistent cadences. “i ordered a beer that never came,” is a bit livelier, with claves-ish clicks and percolating guitar; it dances a bit and flares into jazzy bravado. Some of these cuts have a dream-like aura, like the child’s wind-up lullaby “through a gauntlet of moonlit junk” with its sliding, morphing guitar notes, arcing over bell-tone intricacies. This is an album that works best in darkness and calm; use it as background music and it will disappear.

Jennifer Kelly

Max Eastley / Terry Day / John Butcher—Angles of Enquiry (Confront)

It would be easy to focus on the personally and sonically idiosyncratic aspects of this recording. Given that it’s just one string on a block of wood Max Eastley’s monochord has a spectacularly flexible sound bank; sometimes he sounds like a Vietnamese dan bau, and other times like a reportable manufacturing safety incident. Terry Day’s drumming manages to combine a respect for space with a brisk harshness that keeps things on point; rumor has it that he was not enamored of the drumkit that was supplied to him, and there’s certainly no kindness in his audible touch. And John Butcher’s saxophone playing is, as usual, adroit and immaculately controlled while inhabiting a realm of sounds that others imitate at their peril. But what keeps me coming back to this humble CD-r, which is part of the Confront label’s Core series of new recordings of improvised music, is the way this music feels simultaneously sudden and proportional. The three minds that imagined this music are not only responsive improvisers, but a formidable compositional collective.

Bill Meyer

James Elkington—Me Neither (Important)

James Elkington is an exceptional guitar player, the top-of-list sideman for Wilco and Richard Thompson and an accomplished and fluid folk-indie songwriter, whose agile picking is matched by a sardonic lyrical wit. Me Neither showcases the former, but not the latter, in a series of 29 short, improvised pieces Elkington recorded during the pandemic. There is some lovely playing here in the brief but radiant “Today’s Dictation,” the Brit-folk pavane of “The Incredible Waist of Time,” the buzzy, squeaky urgency of “Where For Do I Run.” Indeed, these cuts are, to a one, rather beautiful for the one or two minutes in which they flare and die. Even, so the overall result is unsatisfying. It’s like making a meal out of happy hour hors d'oeuvres, each bite tasty and caloric, but fleeting.

Jennifer Kelly

Neil Gaiman and the FourPlay String Quartet—Signs of Life (Instrumental)

“Mobius Strip” is an intricate bit of musical machinery. Its pizzicato architecture meshes like sparking gears; its winding violin melody careens wildly over prickly structures. It neither recedes nor predominates over Neil Gaiman’s spoken word, fitting neatly in the spaces he leaves in a fascinating, ruminative story about the twisted paper ring that stands in for eternity. The piece is that most difficult of verbal maneuvers, the extended metaphor, which Gaiman sticks like a gymnast’s landing. His starts with Gaiman’s grandfather demonstrating how you can trace your finger along its surface, traveling from one side to the other without ever breaking contact. It becomes a way of looking at life, connection and the unexpected. As Gaiman concludes, “It’s the twist that brings you back where you started.” “Mobius Strip” is maybe the best and most impressive cut from Signs of Life, but not by much. Joan of Arc makes a disruptive reappearance in raucous, “The Problem with Saints,” while “Credo” recounts Gaiman’s free-thinking philosophy against the throb of mournful cello and viola. There are long extinct animals and barely remembered life turning points and a meditation on death, all spirited and inventive and absolutely without sentimentality. You will hear the words first—you can’t help it—but as you listen, you’ll also notice how well the music supports and nourishes the poetry.

The music on this disc comes from what was intended as a one-time collaboration between celebrated sci-fi/fantasy author Neil Gaiman and Australia’s hippest string quartet. The author’s knotty, reflective spoken word entwined with the FourPlay String Quartet’s spare, rhythmic accompaniment first for a commission at the Sydney Opera House’s Graphic Festival. It went so well that the artists recorded it, had it illustrated and released it as a book, e-book and CD—they have since performed it in New York and London. It is a marvelous piece of work, odd and unsettling, bent and beautiful. I’m not much novelists in rock bands, generally, but this is different.

Jennifer Kelly

Peppermint Moon—Pocket Dial Tears (Self-Released)

Peppermint Moon makes a jangly, mildly psychedelic power pop that might, in other decades, be regarded as Paisley underground. A one-man project of Colin Schitt, who also plays in El Radio Fantastique. Pocket Dial Tears works the tuneful, happy-sad vein of Anton Barbeau, the Lilys and the Young Fresh Fellows, with well-shaped melodies made for staring wistfully out of windows. “I Thought I Knew” lays yearning, reverberating surf guitar licks atop bittersweet, rain-through-sunshine verses; the song has a drifting, musing propulsion, its wry confessions and fiery guitar solos evoking Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3. “Day to Day” pivots more delicately on a music box melody, whammied guitar notes vibrating in the ether around the verse and a little bit of string romanticism swooping in at the interstices. “He She They” is maybe the best of the lot, a lament about being misunderstood spun out into baroque pop grandeur.

Jennifer Kelly

Polyorchard — scree/n (Trip Ticks Tapes)

scree/n is a single, multifaceted improvisation, recorded remotely by an illustrious crew and extending without break for an hour and 20 minutes. David Menestres solicited contributions from Gastr del Sol-into-Black Faurest mainstay David Grubbs, Exploding Star Orchestra’s Jeb Bishop on trombone and experimental saxophonists Laurent Estoppey and Catherine Sikora, a passel of experimental composers and out-there bassist Ollie Brice, then pieced them together in a composition that feels somewhat episodic but not incohesive. It starts in the frayed blowing, a saxophone tone split into two pieces, full of air. This whispery invocation fades, and then the music starts to dance then, another sax (or maybe the same one) kicking out in blowsy frolic, then settling to buzz again. Now a bit of percussion enters in, now a subdued screech of feedback builds in the background. Blasts of noise hammer through contemplative intervals of saxophone. A tune emerges and disappears into buzz and squawk and rumble. A roiling surf wave of noise that maybe comes from an acoustic bass played unconventionally squalls amid rattling knocks on wood. Still the sax persists in making a song out of things, fluttering and beckoning and flirting back at you over one shoulder as it saunters into the maw of things. At the half hour mark you begin to hear David Grubbs in lucid, lyrical chords, placed at wide intervals like wickets on a croquet course that the sax must thread through. Explosive noise erupts and just as suddenly recedes. Serene and unhurried, but somehow also full of sturm and howl, scree/n is a perfect metaphor for our age’s listless anxiety, our ceaseless striving to make sense and beauty out of accumulated sensory inputs.

Jennifer Kelly

Nicole Rampersaud — Saudade (Ansible Editions)

The Portuguese word saudade has no direct translation to English but evokes a complicated mixture of emotions: deep sorrow, wistfulness, longing for a past that brought joy. Toronto composer/improviser and trumpeter Nicole Rampersaud’s debut solo outing complicates matters in that it revels in moving forward and pushing against boundaries. Shards of digital noise hold equal weight to her trumpet intonations, raw breath, puckering and clucking. There’s an immensity at play as the elements interact. Multiple layers pile onto the fray that Rampersaud provokes, such that she conjures a nervous energy. The sparks fly, and her trumpet lines weave around the nests of glowing particles, hoping to avoid catching fire. Perhaps she’s avoiding her own sense of saudade by outpouring such rich and spirited compositions. Regardless, Rampersaud’s music mirrors the complex nature of the term, rather than the literal emotions that lie beneath it. It’s we listeners who end up reaping the benefits, so this writer isn’t complaining.

Bryon Hayes

Andreas Røysum Ensemble — Mysterier (Motvind)

Mysterier (in English, Mysteries) is the third album by Norwegian clarinetist Andreas Røysum’s biggish band, which is populated by musicians who lead or are members of other bands on the Motvind roster. The label’s name translates to Headwind, whose diverse endeavors present an art-as-activism stance, and the album covers depicts the ensemble tying up Uncle Sam and deposing the Monopoly Man whilst dressed in fairytale drag. The music is correspondingly defiant and optimistic, marshalling celebratory grooves, folk melodies and free-ish horn solos to fight the powers that be. Singer Sofie Tollefsbøl’s two turns at the microphone tip the balance towards an English folk vibe, and the grandeur attained by their arrangement of “Barbara Allen puts the rest of the album in the shade. But if Steeleye Span dancing with Organic Music Society at the protest sounds like your vibe, you’ll want to hear the whole thing, which is available on download, vinyl, and green-faced, short-run compact disc.

Bill Meyer

Spanish Love Songs — No Joy (Pure Noise)

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The emotional arc between Spanish Love Songs’ last album and this one can be summed up by going from “my bleak mind says it’s cheaper just to die” to “you're not a cautionary tale/so don't you vanish on me.” The sonic one, meanwhile, comes with the Springsteenian synth backing that accompanies the latter song. Dylan Slocum and the rest of the band are still grappling with oppression both economic (“Clean-Up Crew”) and spiritual (“Rapture Seeker”), and with existentially paralyzing levels of depression (“I’m Gonna Miss Everything,” “Middle of Nine”). But the hard-won perseverance they’ve developed has clearly stuck with them and grown in strength. No Joy is less singularly pummelling, but it more than makes up for it by seamlessly folding in the influence of the band’s new wave and Americana forebears. Just as the February 2020-released Brave Faces Everyone accidentally fit the rest of that extremely dark year perfectly, No Joy feels like the right record for 2023; harrowing, but in a different way.

Ian Mathers

Tacoma Park — What About a Collage? (self released)

You could excuse Carrboro, NC duo Tacoma Park if they’d decided to rest on their laurels for the rest of 2023. Their self-titled second album, released in April, could be fairly considered a triumph (it was here at Dusted, for one), the culmination of years of adjusting to a new, pandemic-related creative practice, which also generated a series of singles (which they collected this September). That’s a productive year. Instead, Ben Felton and John Harrison have given us all this 40-minute new single. The title probably refers more to their taste in album art than the nature of “What About a Collage?” itself, because this is a pretty focused journey. It starts out a little more on the bleepy-bloopy end of things before whisking the listener off to a space where it feels like Ash Ra Tempel is playing around with Mountains. Eventually the whole thing ends with some beautiful interplay between what sounds like synthesized woodwinds and some plangent guitar. Good to hear that their lengthy, labyrinthine album doesn’t appear to have come anywhere close to tapping out their creativity.

Ian Mathers

Trespass Trio Featuring Susana Santos Silva — Live In Oslo (Clean Feed)

This summit between the Swedish Trespass Trio and the commanding Portuguese trumpeter, Susana Santos Silva, was recorded in 2018 and released in 2023. While the date span might suggest that it’s release was instigated by COVID-time shelf-cleaning, it takes just a few seconds to hear that the quality of the music was not a factor in the delay. The trio, which comprises baritone/sopranino saxophonist Martin Küchen, bassist Per Zanussi, and drummer Raymond Strid, brings a sequence of flexible tunes that encompass the slow-motion dirges roiled with turbulent rhythmic undercurrents and instant, combustible exchanges. Santos is right there with them, darting and jabbing during the fiery moments and amplifying the tragedy of the slow passages. The set was only 32 minutes long, so that’s what you get, but it’s quite enough for music of such conviction.

Bill Meyer

#dust #dusted magazine #gabriel birnbaum #jennifer kelly #max eastley #bill meyer #james elkington #neil gaiman #four-play string quartet #peppermint moon #polyorchard #nicole rampersaude #bryon hayes #Andreas Røysum #spanish love songs #ian mathers #tacoma park #trespass trio

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