Disquiet

The soundcloud.com page of Chicago-based musician Nicholas Davis is an assortment of self-contained sonic types. There are welcome urban field recordings of the city’s celebrated trains. There is wonderfully strange exotic folk-drone music. And there are, among other emerging categories of musical adventure, various short improvisations filed under the promising section header “Oscillator vs Guitar.” There are, as of this writing, five of these match-ups in total. And given that the opening one includes the word “tuning” and the closing one the word “outro,” it’s safe to listen to them under the assumption that they comprise a whole, and should be listened to in sequence. (They are numbered 1 through 5.) That said, they differ widely, even though each is indeed a mix of guitar improvisations and the presence of noise from what one presumes is an oscillator.

The exercises provide a good example of a moment when the meaningfulness of the waveforms that are intrinsic to the Soundcloud site can be called into question. A track like “Oscillator vs Guitar pt4″ seems, by gauging its fairly blockish waveform, likely to be less antic than, say, the more vibrant and varied “Oscillator vs Guitar pt3.” The opposite proves to be the case. No close reading of number 3 in the series would prepare the listener for the way the opening oscillator gives way to light figurations that, while angular and active, nonetheless comprise an overall meditative and monastic whole. Number 4, by contrast, is certainly static, but its stasis is woven from anxiety.

The guitar and oscillator series might be read as a series of duets for man and machine, or of a guitarist utilizing the oscillator as a kind of tonal metronome, a drone-keeper that sets a very slow pace.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/passerby. They were all recorded live on October 31 of this year, and are listed as “rehearsals.”

Amorphous music becomes all the more so when live performances are experienced on tape. Take Cloud Shepherd‘s work, for example. With all the gravitas of a dark ritual, it unfold in mystic proportions: droning intonations, whisps of sonic smoke, percussion that seems to resonate with unseen forces. Unseen forces, of course, are key to the listening experience when one hears a recording of a live performance. It isn’t especially clear who is doing what. For a new listener to jazz, it can be a learning experience to distinguish saxophone from trumpet, let alone a tenor sax from an alto. In improvisatory zones that lean toward space music, such as Cloud Shepherd’s appropriately titled album Unknown, the challenge is even more significant. The best response to the challenge is to ignore it. Spend less time trying to sort out what the instrumentation is, and more on the overall flow.

And lest the improvisatory intent and droning undercurrent suggest otherwise, Cloud Shepherd are not without a sense of humor. The lyrics to the first of the album’s five tracks are provided, thanks to a handy Bandcamp tool. These lyrics consist of a single word: “Oohwowwowza.” And while the first four tracks are named for their track numerals, the fifth track appears to be titled “6.”

Cloud Shepherd appears to consist of three members — Andrew Joron, Brian Lucas, and Joseph Noble — though information is somewhat scarce (one album cover appears to feature four individuals). Get Unknown and other Cloud Shepherd music for free download and streaming at cloud-shepherd.bandcamp.com. (Photo borrowed from wehavenozen.blogspot.com.)

Over at percussionlab.com, Radere (aka Carl Ritger) posted a live set he performed at this year’s Communikey festival in Boulder, Colorado. Opening with shimmering guitar and cloud-break choral effects, the piece builds in density and intensity, as if the soft-focus sounds are slowly brought into stark relief, and their fractured surfaces are revealed for all their grizzled imperfection, and yet in turn those imperfections come to urge their own sense of wonder. In other words, it’s downright fractal.

I’d interviewed Ritger for a story about Communikey in advance of the festival (“Ghost in the Machine”), and was glad for the opportunity to, belatedly, hear his set. The brief descriptive note at Percussion Lab, and at Ritger’s soundcloud.com/radere account, note that he used “Guitar, pedals and laptop” and that he performed material from two of his releases, A Season in Decline and Lost at Sea, I’m Never Coming Back.

However, like as with any good music, repeated listens brought questions, and so I asked Ritger to discuss the performance a little more thoroughly.

Marc Weidenbaum: What was the equipment you used?

Carl Ritger: The primary element in all of my performances is the guitar, which I run through a constantly evolving array of pedals and processing stages. This particular set was one of my last using my laptop as a processing tool, actually. I had my guitar patched into a preamp, an overdrive, and a variety of delay pedals before hitting the soundcard. From there, the signal went through a bunch of granular effects and things of that nature, resulting in the swelling drones that you hear in the recording. The laptop was also running a few layers of field recordings and textural elements, which were culled from several releases, including stuff I’ve done for the labels Full Spectrum and Basic_Sounds.

Weidenbaum: What was the performance space?

Ritger: I performed at the Communikey headquarters during the festival, which was located in the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. It was a beautiful space with nice hardwood floors and plenty of natural light. Plus, a bunch of my friends from around the country were in the audience, including some I hadn’t seen in years. It was a really nice vibe.

Weidenbaum: What was your aesthetic goal?

Ritger: A lot of that material was produced during a pretty weird period in my life. I was pretty isolated, so I found my aesthetic shifting from quieter, minimalist place to a louder, slightly more abrasive sound. I guess in a sense, working with distortion and feedback more deeply provided a level of catharsis that more subtle forms couldn’t provide me with. The core of what I’ve always been interested in — signal processing, drones, minimalism — was still intact, but the volume was always inching upwards. I actually played a show out here in Boulder shortly after my relocation and the promoter was worried they were going to get their first noise complaint! I would never have imagined being faced with that sort of situation during a performance even just a year ago.

Track originally posted for free streaming and download at soundcloud.com/radere and percussionlab.com. More on Radere/Ritger at falsereactions.tumblr.com and twitter.com/crtgr.

It will be interesting to read retrospective impressions, a decade from now, about the generation of musicians who gave themselves over to the drone — a generation of musicians who dispensed with the recognizable and memorable sequences of melodic elements of their recent predecessors, and instead distinctly favored a tonal bliss (and seeming stasis) whose unique properties divulge themselves only through close listening, deep patience, and side-by-side comparison.

There will be vast amounts of music to be revisited, ranging throughout genres, from doom metal gongs to rural country ambience to everday noises derived from the realm of European free improvisation. No doubt the work of William Fowler Collins will be considered. Perhaps drone scholars will focus on the recording of his live performance at the On Land Festival in San Francisco from 2009. An MP3 of it was posted earlier today for free download at the website of the record label Root Strata (rootstrata.com), which sponsored the concert series, and it is already circulating widely. (It’s enclosed in a Zip file and housed on the mediafire.com service.)

I was at the concert. In my review at the time, “On Land Festival, Opening Afternoon,” I noted how Collins, who performed solo, “evoked his adopted home of the southwest by producing rich, feedback-intense approximations of Ennio Morricone soundtracks; he patiently limned the delicate no man’s land between abstraction and melody.” As heard in the MP3, the concert was even darker than description at the time suggests. When the sound of a lap guitar arises, it’s as if a whole world of hurt has been unpacked from a single chord from an old Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys recording. When waves of feedback waft up, it’s like the the entire Neil Young catalog has been set afire. And on the occasion when rhythm dares to present itself, as a nascent chugga-chugga, the failure — the determined failure — to resolve into a deeper, more trenchant phrasing reveals the piece as an especially maudlin vestige of doom metal. The sense of ritual, of ceremony, makes a very strong impression.

Track originally posted at rootstrata.com. More on Collins at williamfowlercollins.com.

He has a new album, The Resurrections Unseen, out on the Type label, and it is streaming freely at soundcloud.com:

More on the new release at typerecords.com.