ILX Gonna Shine in My Backdoor Someday (new post-Fahey folk for ppl posting in Takoma/Tompkins Square threads Pt II)

Nice! I love that Homegas record nice to see it highlighted.

I re-listened to that Homegas record earlier this year and I think I came away with a wider appreciation of it. I probably last listened to it like 10 years ago and the fast songs (like Bumblebee) were the ones that appealed to me. I was pretty surprised how nice the songwriting is on the more traditionally "folky" tracks; now that I've come more around to that kind of stuff.

Also, was just cruising through the Takoma discogs page to jog my memories and came across a release page for a mispress that combined the B side of Blind Joe Death with the A side of The Alan Parsons Project's I Robot, lol.

https://www.discogs.com/The-Alan-Parsons-Project-John-Fahey-I-Robot-Volume-1-Blind-Joe-Death/release/16058078

out now, really good, I think FE might have vinyl copies

https://feedingtuberecords.bandcamp.com/album/matthew-j-rolin

oh FFS wrong link, sorry, this is the new one:

https://www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/matthew-j-rolin-the-dreaming-bridge-2lp/FTR.586LP.html

super psyched for this one, rolin has been on a rol lately

the powers/rolin on trouble in mind and the powers/rolin/gercyz on garden portal are both really good

https://cameronknowlereliwinter.bandcamp.com/album/anticipation

Dusted: Two young guitar hot shots take up residence in a Houston studio to share their love of finger-picked folk, slide blues, bluegrass and Michael Chapman.

sorry to jump back to the previous convo, Dinsdale ... i opened that link and will listen, but:

Many here know this world *much* better than I do (and have listened to it much more than I have), so I'm curious: Rolin (at times) gives me stronger Jack Rose vibes/feels than maybe anyone else. Agree/disagree?

Daniel Bachman
Axacan
Three Lobed
7 May 2021

There has never been an album quite like Axacan, guitarist Daniel Bachman’s latest double LP. By defiantly playing against type and creating an album that, sonically and compositionally speaking, has more in common with Pierre Schaeffer or Edgard Varèse than John Fahey or even Jack Rose, Bachman has crafted one of the most introspective and deeply personal albums of instrumental music released in recent memory.

Axacan weaves together acoustic guitar and harmonium alongside raw material from various locations, events, and natural phenomena to create a conceptual three-dimensional collage. Using everything from field recordings of church bells, frogs, and birds to treated radio broadcasts, dead pine trees, and tuned fishing wire, Bachman has both honed and mastered the compositional technique hinted at on 2018’s The Morning Star. As on that album, the guitarist’s approach on Axacan is both documentary and authorial, utilizing electroacoustic techniques, organic drones, and environmental sounds to enrich his exhilarating music. These sounds are deployed reverently; there is very little superficial “sound for sound’s sake” here. Each creak, clatter, or bang colors Bachman’s aural Polaroids with deep and personal significance.

The keening and spooky “Blues In The Anthropocene” is a prime example of Bachman’s compositional framework: sounding at first like a lost, ethereal Guitar Roberts side, the piece’s accompaniment by the sound events of rusted tools being throw into a dumpster, high pitched feedback from a radio broadcast, and a storm on Bachman’s familial homestead Ferry Farm—a reputedly haunted plantation and Civil War battlefield once occupied by George Washington—provide a kind of orchestral menace. The piece ends abruptly, as if the room from which these sounds were emanating was suddenly struck by lightning, leaving only the lonesome sound of rain. “Year of the Rat” begins with a plaintive, unhurried exploration of a guitar tuning, hearkening back to Bachman’s earlier LPs; soon, the playing begins increasing in tempo like a person hurtling deeper and deeper into anxiety recounting a traumatic event before settling down, as if tranquilized.

The epic and ominous “Blue Ocean 0” mixes lapping waves, polysynth, fiddle, and tape machine, as well as the sound of wind blowing through fishing line and tuned to a harmonium drone, to convey the grim scientific epoch theorized in its title. “Big Summer,” too, masterfully integrates Bachman’s indisputable guitar prowess with a sense of calamitous menace: the sound of an unaccompanied acoustic slide guitar is heard emanating from what sounds like a waterlogged, malfunctioning cassette, the tremulous vibrato supplied by the limitations of the warbling tape. The effect is like hearing some lost country blues literally unearthed from the soil.

On “WBRP 47.5,” we can make out, amidst radio dial surfing, a brief snippet of dialogue:

“…it might be some time before things can…”

The voice abruptly cuts off before we can hear more, though we hear this same sample repeated a few minutes later, suggesting that this is less a mere exercise in knob-turning than the evocation of a time loop. The chilly ambiguity of the message, and the accompanying rustling of a dead pine tree slowed to match the pitch of the drone and fiddle, only reinforces the dread. As the radio sounds fade, pained roars evoke immolation, turbulence, the death of a bellowing beast. Bachman follows this with album highlight “Coronach,” a probing 12-string rumination that stands as Bachman’s most accomplished and beautiful guitar piece in years.

By carefully selecting and meticulously editing the album’s many extra-and-non-musical sounds, Bachman imbues the music with both a sense of place and a sense of purpose, chronicling a search for meaning, hope, and truth in haystacks both figurative and literal. It is no mean feat to produce a largely instrumental album that somehow deals directly with the crises of our time—climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the lingering effects of colonialism and genocide—and make it intimate and personal, but Axacan is such an album, a spiritual cousin of equally apocalyptic masterpieces like Penderecki’s “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima,” William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, and Lou Reed’s Berlin. Great works of art such as these can often leave you breathless, but they do something else, too: they can leave you changed.

-James Toth
If you have any questions, contact nathan at riotactmedia.com.

he powers/rolin/gercyz on garden portal

I got this LP for my birthday. I hadn't heard of it before but it's really nice acoustic drone.

I didn't know there was an LP version! that's cool. I have the tape.

Yeah, the LP was released last month.

no idea who this is but really really like this, very atmospheric

https://blackbrunswicker.bandcamp.com/album/temple-of-spring?fbclid=IwAR2h9_cd42HQCBV3msdXe6rqa91u65MAMruGWsgwVx18textAdFW95P6ZpM

Loving this- thanks!!

Scratched the same itch as this has done for me, albeit not as ambient:

https://4theyemusick.bandcamp.com/album/anthony-pasquarosa-morning-meditations

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/arts/music/solo-guitar-diversity.html

nice piece! too much on the "and here's why" on the lede but maybe that's unavoidable

yasmin williams album didn't grab me, too windham hill for me. lots of folk whos taste i admire like it though, maybe need to give it another shot

it engages fairly easily which is nice. after i played it for her, my partner has gotten several of her junior high classes and private music lesson students into her. the "she looks like me" factor really matters to these kids and of course it does.

nice article — I like some of these players more than others, but I think Gwenifer Raymond sums it up well: “Representation matters — that’s just true. The music can only get more interesting.”

speaking of which, just got the new sarah louise album and it is VERY interesting. she continues to have a weird/cool trajectory.

wow yeah it's great. some of her other left-field moves didn't grab me, but i am way into this. not to speak for her, but based on the 1,000 roses fest, part of me imagines that she's thumbing it to the old codgers in attendance there, wonderfully recounted by UMS way back when

ugh is 'grab me' the only thing i can think of to say in lieu of 'i liked this music'

global - I've thought that several times that I think that specific day changed the trajectory of her career

when I and (our bandmate MB) went to see Itasca we were buying her record and I mentioned we had seen her there she was like "yeah that whole thing was weird"

Do you look back on it negatively? I think besides the silly Q&A drama nothing else seemed too off to me honestly.

BTW by then Sarah was already on her way departing from the tropes of that genre, exhibited by her performance at that festival (was overtly not "American Primitive" in any identifiable way).

no I had one of the best times of my life, the whole thing was great. and the general vibes were very positive. just some of those really old codgers seemed to have some axes from like 1966 to grind

but again i wasn't a woman on that particular panel, i feel like that could really sour someone on the whole thing

oh for sure, you're right, her thing was way more..free jazz? frankly, i appreciated the gesture more than the actual performance (didn't really seem to go anywhere for me, jazz is hard it turns out)

yeah her post-solo guitar stuff has struck me as cool, but not quite getting there. this new one gets there, i think.

just discovered my new favorite singer songwriter with some thread relevant content

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms71XrEx_cY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xe1jA6G-Qk

for the past several years, i've gone to the Pickathon festival near Portland (Oregon), and one of my favorite little games to play is noting which of the artists on the bill i see at the most *other artists'* sets. (poorly worded, but you know what i mean.) a few years ago, Sarah Louise won by a landslide; i remember watching her get *deeply* into Kikagaku Moyo, Circuit des Yeux and Milo (aka RAP Ferreira), to name a few

i remember randomly finding that guy on spotify (probably how most people find him), his ouvre was singing about cleaning the toilet at the time. glad to see he's expanded his reach xp

A message to the Spotify musician The Passionate & Objective Jokerfan (aka Matt Farley)

ah should have figured there was already a thread

xp oh good I was waiting for this generation to finally produce its very own Wesley Willis

I think maybe this fits the thread, and I've been enjoying it so far on limited listening. Nice cover art too

https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a1001435145_16.jpg

cameron knowler is a really pretty album, reminds me a big of ambsace by elkington/salsburg

got my vinyl of the new marissa anderson/william tyler in the mail, really great they compliment each other so well. some songs are exactly what you'd expect but there are some curveballs that don't really sound like anything either has done individually.

Agreed! WFMU's Garbage Time (on Tuesdays) has been playing that a lot among other new things all in this wheelhouse & more. Have you ever listened to it? Great show.

Mine is still in the mail, I hope. So looking forward to it showing up any minute.

yeah can't wait for that anderson / tyler LP.

I've heard the new Hayden Pedigo LP (https://haydenpedigo.bandcamp.com/album/letting-go) and it's really beautiful in a mellow popol vuh kinda way.

oh and Ben Chasny's upcoming album is a welcome return to his Octavio Paz era, really nice, mostly solo acoustic (a little synthy stuff happening occasionally). https://benchasny.bandcamp.com/album/the-intimate-landscape

Whoa, ok so both of those were played on Garbage Time too... I think Hayden even came on right after Cameron.

sounds like a good show!

Wow I gotta check out that show

That it is. Minor correction, he played Ben Chasny last week. I was right about the others being back to back.

Tuesday: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/106914
Last Tuesday: https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/106522

(posting links so you can check the rest of the playlists out if you'd like)

Liked the Cameron Knowler on first listen. Some of the things I sometimes want more of in this genre are stronger foregrounding of melody, variation in texture, and more extended harmony, all of which are things he provides.

Pitchfork front page today has Steve Gunn and Nathan Salsburg!

WTF? ok neat

https://www.instagram.com/p/CUNU9BEl41D/

ha, nice. that new hayden record is great — maybe one of the best *sounding* acoustic guitar records I've heard, really well recorded.

Taken me a while to get around to it but What in the Natural World by Jake Xerxes Fussell is magnificent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOlHEL19GYI

yeah I love him! really engaging

I love his tone, particular the washes and runs on the high strings. I keep having to remind myself that he's Travis picking most of the time (on this album at least).

his interpretation of "jump for joy" by duke ellington is so amazing

Hell yes.