by Nick Ostrum
Guillaume Gargaud and Eero Savela – Syyspimee (Ramble Records,
2023)
This one escaped me last year. However, it seems to have been released on
Bandcamp just this year, so I will include it in this year’s guitar week.
Guillaume Gargaud is French guitarist, who, despite
release
with the late Burton Greene I covered a few years ago for FreeJazzBlog, has
over 35 releases under his belt. Finnish trumpeter Eero Savela was
previously unknown to me, though a quick internet search shows he has been
quite active in live performances, especially in various forms of dance,
theater and even circuses. This is their second duo release, the first
being 2020’s Helsinki.
There is a real ease to this music. The title, Syyspimee, is Finnish for
“the darkness of autumn,” but this is a calm darkness, a welcome extended
twilight after an active summer. I hesitate to go much further along this
somnolent line, however, as the music is not sleepy or enervated or boring.
IT is just relaxed. Both musicians display a range of techniques, some
conventional, some less so. However, the volleys of sound, the vining of
guitar and trumpet runs, the skill and vision behind the deceptive veil of
simplicity make this one stand out. Gargaud lays an almost classical
progression on his acoustic guitar, Savela responds with a series of smokey
spirals. Gargaud responds with another slowhand lick and Savela, with a
jaunt that evokes a smokey Miles or Chet Baker. If this loose serenity is
what this autumn holds, I happily bid summer adieu.
Syysipmeeis available as a CD and download on Bandcamp.
Eldritch Priest – Dormitive Virtue (Halocline Trance, 2024)
Eldritch Priest, composer and guitarist who released the infectious
Omphaloskepsis
two years ago is back with another solo effort. This one,
Dormitive Virtue
, focuses less on earworms, and leans much harder into layers of riffing
and light feedback. There is a fine line between noodling and this type of
performance, and that line seems to consist of intentionality and
dedication to a motif and mood. Priest strides the right side of this
divide.
Dormitive virtue refers to opium’s hypnogogic properties, which invite the
blurring of sleep and hallucination. I am not sure how this would sound in
an altered state, but it is certainly mesmerizing. Each of its eight
tracks sucks the listener into its frequently liquid sound world. The
guitar is measured and spacey, flickering like an ill-defined and distant
star or blurred like a moon lightly covered by a gauze of cloud. The music
sounds composed, if not on paper than at least in Priest’s head, but
follows no regular pattern. And, as with Omphaloskepsis, there are
sections that are so rich (think the more elevating moments of Kraftwerk)
that they border on juicy pleasures.
Dormitive Virtueis available as a slick-looking vinyl and download
from Bandcamp.
Eyal Maoz and Eugene Chadbourne – The Coincidence Masters
(Infrequent Seams, 2024)
Here is another review of a guitar duo that does not disappoint. Eugene
Chadbourne, of course is a freakabilly, radical country, free improv
extraordinaire. Eyal Maoz might have less of a reputation, but that is no
reflection of his wide musical interests (rock, reggae, Jewish/Eastern
European folk traditions, reggae, free jazz [of course]) nor of his
playing.
From the first notes of The Coincidence Masters,Chadbourne leans
on the avant-garde of his unique syntax and Maoz holds his own. That sounds
too combative, though. On any of these pieces Maoz and Chadbourne seem of
like mind, playing a combination of straightforward picking and augmented
chords and piercing shreds. Much of this is comparatively relaxed, a front
porch jam just when the alien vessel arrives. O, maybe a dazed
contemplation of the constellations, complete with heavy connotations of
just how ethereal and strange that process can be. (For those to whom this
means something, I cannot shake the thought that this might be, even
subconsciously or mistakenly, a meditation on the Flatlanders’ The Stars in
My Life, albeit without the groove and vocals, and chopped up, processed,
digested, and distorted almostbeyond recognition.) Anyway, this
one is a real standout in its skill and understated oddity. Rock on, Eyal
and Chad, and watch out for those tractor beams.
The Coincidence Masteris available as a CD and download from
Bandcamp.
Elliot Sharp, Sally Gates, Tashi Dorji – Ere Guitar (Intakt, 2024)
To paraphrase Ash Williams when confronted with a triad of Necronomica in
Army of Darkness, “Three guitars? Nobody said anything about three
guitars? Like what am I supposed to follow one guitar, or all guitars, or
what?”
The second installment of Elliot Sharp’s E(e)r(e) Guitar presents the
listener with that conundrum. This time with Sally Gates and Tashi Dorji,
the answer is, well, opaque. Ere Guitaris a cauldron of electric
whirling, twirling and more general electro-rummage cacophony. One almost
immediately loses track of which guitarist is playing which line, as
everything mixes in the same stew. Flecks and shards of atmospherics bleed
in and out of the background, as one guitarist, then another steps in to
shred, or lay out a fusillade of clicks and plinks. Some parts, such as the
beginning of Survey the Damage – incidentally the longest cut on the album
– adopt a darker mood, laying drones on feedback. Then, however, the shocks
of sound emerge, jetting back and forth and tearing into the gloomy tonal
canvas. Then, the striated shocks open to finer moments of precision
etching and, more often, blunter ones of gouges and scrapes, and the clunky
repeating click of an engine. I am not sure what Ash would have made of
this, especially way back in 1992, when the film came out, or the generic
medieval setting in which it took place. That said, this would have been a
fitting soundtrack at least to his journey through the time portal from one
to the other. Just awesome.
Ere Guitar is available as a CD or download from Bandcamp.