#rex mcmurry

[dustedmagazine]

Nathan Bowles Trio — Are Possible (Drag City)

Photo by Asia Harman

The Nathan Bowles Trio whips a buggy wagon onto interstellar highways, hammering rustic grooves into motorik repetition until they lift out of the past into the endless now. The trio first convened on Bowles’ 2018 album Plainly Mistaken pushing traditional instruments—banjo for Bowles, string bass for Casey Toll and drums for Rex McMurry—into sprawling psychedelic spaces. Are Possible is sparer but no less adventurous, paring back motifs to essence, locking them in for extended intervals, and allowing repetition to make them flower.

The opening “Dapple” distills a sprightly dance into its architectural elements, letting the play of banjo flourish amid resounding piano chords. McMurry’s drumming both grounds and elevates the agile interplay of stringed instruments; endless vistas reminiscent of his old band, CAVE, open out as he batters and thumps. “The Ternions,” an old-fashioned word for trio, by the way, opens out like a tarmac road stretching to the shimmery distance, its propulsion softened by flurries of lingering overtones. Toll’s bass gets a fuller hearing in “Our Air,” a cut that slants on low-toned plucking into a countrified form of jazz.

Still it’s in the two longer cuts that the trio makes its most indelible mark. “Gimme My Shit” builds in pointillist complexity, a hoedown shifting in and out of Reichian minimalism. “Aims” dips more freely into blues forms, letting the banjo and guitar carry a plaintive porch-lit melody. It gathers itself and swings out wide a minute or so in, a drone sluicing through pizzicato filigrees, a ritual beat carrying the tune forward. Indeed, the drums go knocking and walloping as the piece progresses, turning an inward-looking dreamscape into visceral, body-shifting triumph. All the elements come from pre-electric blues, but the end result is modern, almost futuristic.

The book of Matthew tells us that “With God, all things are possible,” and while I wouldn’t second guess the religious inclinations of any of these three musicians, there is an aura of immanence, of something more than banjo, bass and drums, that infuses these mystic tracks. Many things are possible, too, when you put together three such capable player and give them time and space to transcend themselves.

Jennifer Kelly

[burlveneer-music]

Bitchin Bajas - Bajascillators - back to original material on this new album of four long tracks

Bajascillators rolls four unique numbers that act on their own AND as extensions of each other, phases in perfect flow...wave after wave of analogue synth tones and zones extending into a stratospheric arc. Each time, as the needle cradles into the playout groove, you the listener are becalmed, in stasis, forever changed. Until you flip the side — and forever changes again… Bitchin Bajas: Cooper Crain Rob Frye Daniel Quinlivan with Mike Reed on cymbals Nori Tanaka on cymbals Rex McMurry on drums Parts of "Amorpha" were created using Laurie Spiegel's Music Mouse software. Artwork by Nick Ciontea

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Three Lobed/WXDU Hopscotch Afternoon Jamboree 2017

Spend some time visiting or revisiting this year’s typically magnificent Three Lobed/WXDU day party. Always a blast! I was especially taken with the primal thump of Philadelphia’s Long Hots, who have a raw VU-at-La-Cave-in-1968 vibe happening. Also awesome is the debut performance of the Nathan Bowles Trio, featuring some serious jams from Bowles, Cave drummer Rex McMurry and Mount Moriah double bassist Casey Toll. And Purling Hiss! And Rosali! There should be more to come, too, so keep yr eyes peeled. As always, thanks to the performers, Cory at Three Lobed, Jonas at NYC Taper, the people at WXDU. Really amazing to be able to check this stuff out ... 

[tinymixtapes]

Music Review: CAVE - Allways

CAVE Allways [Drag City; 2018] Rating: 4/5 The video for “San’ Yago” from CAVE’s new album Allways is a montage of hot dog eateries from around the band’s hometown of Chicago shot in gauzy 16mm. It’s subtly bold, a flag cast high for the Midwest, the restaurants acting as a stand-in for a complicated but acute brand of civic pride that comes from living in a place like Chicago. For locals (or expats, like myself), it becomes a game to see how many you’ve eaten at. Guitar and bass riff rhythmically on a single note, while a keyboard lays out a two-chord progression that slowly develops until the band breaks into a unison vocal line, wordless but buoyant. Drums bounce playfully but steadily, foregrounded in the mix. It’s a perfect distillation of CAVE — their mellow intensity and the context from which they emerge. CAVE exist within a rich, diverse, and perpetually blooming underground Chicago music community, guided by a spirit of exploration and genre-agnosticism that’s rarely such an ingrained part of a city’s musical character. Over the past decade, the band has emerged as a unifying presence in Chicago’s musical ecosystem, thanks to both the band’s elastic definition of what a rock band does and its phenomenal live shows, which showcase the group’s ability to play precise music with a looseness that belies its intricacy. Guitarist/keyboardist Cooper Crain, also of drift perfectionists Bitchin Bajas, has further helped define the city’s sound by engineering or mixing scores of records from Chicago musicians, including Ryley Walker, Circuit des Yeux, Matchess, Mind Over Mirrors, ADT, Joshua Abrams, and Running. Allways is CAVE’s fourth full-length and arrives five years after Thrace, which showed the band restraining its more overt psychedelic tendencies and adding Bajas windman Rob Frye. That quintet returns here, and the band’s focus on extended groove remains the foundation of the music. Change happens incrementally for CAVE, in the large and small scale. Their songs develop linearly, often driven by subtle rhythmic complications over purely melodic ones. Those progressions are informed more by minimalism and the percussion traditions of Africa and Latin America than conventional rock structures, while still retaining the energy and constituent elements of rock music. Opener “The Juan” moves through several distinct sections that evolve as developing motifs lock into place at just the right moment. After a short intro of muted guitar and syncopated drum hits, the music stops before bursting forth with a melodic bass riff that carries the tune under bright pads of synth. As the guitars establish interlocking riffs, Frye’s flute floats above, darting around before suddenly snapping together into a descending melody. Elsewhere, the grooves become a backdrop for both spontaneous explorations and straight-up jams. The 10-minute slow-burn “Beaux” leans most overtly toward a more established Krautrock template, giving Crain an opportunity to indulge in fuzzy leads. “Dusty” seems poised to explode into a wah-fueled free-for-all, but is expertly reigned in. Throughout, drummer Rex McMurry establishes and maintains the mood of each song, giving the other instrumentalists the space to build on the basic template he lays down. With the exception of the increased usage of their own voices, there are few surprises on Allways. But with an approach so pliable and unique, a band like CAVE doesn’t need to reinvent itself on each record, because the core of what it does is already so innovative. Allways, then, is simply a welcome return from one of Chicago’s most consistent artists, reaffirming their primacy among contemporary exploratory rock bands. http://j.mp/2RpvCOS

[musicblogwales]

Listen: Nathan Bowles - ‘The Road Reversed’

Plainly Mistaken, its title apt, adjusts assumptions we might have made about the scope and scale of Nathan’s music, which sounds both more exquisitely controlled and more dangerously unleashed than ever before. We hear here his ever restless roving between the poles of Appalachian and Piedmont string band traditions and ecstatic drone. In the former category are his percolating full-band rerecording of Ernie Carpenter’s “Elk River Blues” (which previously appeared in a very different solo iteration on A Bottle, A Buckeye [2012]); “Fresh & Fairly So,” the indelibly careening melody of which could be an old-time standard; and “Stump Sprout,” the ghost of a misremembered reel. The latter category includes the solo recordings “Umbra,” “Girih Tiles” (played on the “mellowtone,” a custom banjo/bazouki hybrid instrument built by Rex McMurry’s father Maurice), and the improvised “In Kind” suite. However, never before has Bowles offered such a surprising, but succinct, crystallization of his diverse work with other groups—Steve Gunn, Pelt, the Black Twig Pickers, and most recently, Jake Xerxes Fussell’s band, in which he serves double duty on drums and banjo—made possible here by the fleshed-out full-band configuration and arrangements. Colleague and mutual musical admirer Bill Callahan writes of these scale shifts in Nathan’s music as, alternately, “the grand blankness of seeing everything at once” or “a pinhole vision that soothes and subjects in its narrowness”—the two conditions as, perhaps, two sides of the same equation of Panopticon-to-pinhole compositional logic. That also sounds like a description of spiritual jazz, or the trance context of gnawa song, both of which inform Bowles’s work here. But this is not solipsistic music. Plainly Mistaken also gestures outward to the world, as Bowles considers the cycles of deceit and self-deception that shape both our personal and political lives. “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he writes, “that we’re generally ahistorical and snowblind, unable to adequately digest the past in order to live sufficiently in the present.” The album jacket includes a quotation from Javier Marías’s 2014 novel Thus Bad Begins: “We go from deceit to deceit and know that, in that respect, we are not deceived, and yet we always take the latest deceit for the truth.” It might be funny if it wasn’t so devastating. And so a mixed mood of melancholy and merriment permeates Bowles’s own compositions as well as the interpretive material. His rambunctious and exuberant version of Cousin Emmy and Her Kinfolk’s 1946 proto-bluegrass classic “Ruby,” the other vocal track here—elided with “In Kind I”���draws primarily from the 1968 version by Silver Apples instead of the canonical versions by the Osborne Brothers or Buck Owens, thereby embodying a tribute to a palimpsest of bluegrass-meets-avant-garde iterations that perfectly suits Nathan’s own practice. In its trio-fueled headlong canter, “Ruby” feels unhinged and manic, a sinister interrogative mantra that encapsulates the slippery cycle of deception and stuttering accusation that plagues our contemporary cultural moment. Ride the dolphin.   Praise for Bowles' previous album, Whole and Cloven: "Lovely." Mojo 4*s "A powerful and compelling record that demands repeated listens." fRoots "A restless, thoughtful and constantly engaging collection that deserves to be heard by many." Record Collector 4*s "Fluently melodic digressions and pungent dissonances generate a forward momentum and haunted atmosphere." The Wire "His style is scraggly yet sophisticated, ranging boldly from country drones to rambunctious rural ragas." Uncut 8/10 "Splits the difference between Jack Rose-ian acoustic romps and Henry Flynt-y drone jigs. A portal through time." – NPR Music "Bowles has the power to transform the sound of a banjo—and folk music—into something transcendental … something boundless and new. [He’s] a crucial force in folk music, showcasing his ability to interweave the genre’s communal spirit with chilling moments of ambient introspection." – Pitchfork Nathan Bowles Links:

Website Paradise of Bachelors Twitter Facebook Instagram Spotify

[musiccosmosru]

Back in 2016, we premiered Whole & Cloven, the third album by Virginia banjo balladeer Nathan Bowles, calling it “a striking collection of Appalachian folk music refracted through the lens of experimental composition” and the man himself “part of the constellation of bright young Americana stars flickering the Paradise Of Bachelors galaxy.” Today Bowles has announced the follow-up to that record.

Plainly Mistaken, out this October, marks the first time Bowles has recorded his own music with a full band — though he’s logged plenty of time in other people’s ensembles, including Steve Gunn’s backing band and the Black Twig Pickers. Other players here include bowed double bassist Casey Toll of Mount Moriah and Jake Xerxes Fussell’s band and CAVE drummer Rex McMurry.

The album is preceded today by “The Road Reversed,” a gorgeously droning 10-minute exploration that reminds us how much forward-thinking ambition Bowles brings to a typically traditionalist instrument. Not that Bowles is throwing the history of the banjo out the window; rather, he finds ways to apply classically rustic techniques to new frontiers of sound. Take a journey with it below.

TRACKLIST: 01 “Now If You Remember” 02 “The Road Reversed” 03 “Umbra” 04 “Elk River Blues” 05 “Ruby/In Kind I” 06 “Girih Tiles” 07 “Fresh & Fairly So” 08 “In Kind II” 09 “Stump Sprout”

Plainly Mistaken is out 10/5 via Paradise Of Bachelors. Pre-order it from the label or elsewhere.

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