Revolt of the ILX Brigade: New Post-Fahey Folk For PPL that post in the Takoma & Tompkin's Square Threads

ok i had to put it on. just harmonically & melodically lush and gorgeous. the whole record is like one long contented sigh. it's very intimate & has real ebb&flow, where he will cautiously advance something and then back away again into the shadows. I think this album fulfilled fahey's ambition of solo concert guitar better than any of fahey's albums, the way it very gently creates so much space, the ability to create separate parts. there's a lot of definition, call&response, beautiful tunes suddenly cascading out over the top of pieces. 'expansive' is definitely right, he is a great player & a really great arranger, the bossa nova technique is just slowed and opened up, which is a lot less cluttered than fahey or basho's finger-picking pattern reductio ad absurdum monstrosities. playing on a classical guitar helps this too, he has great tone & gets really good bass... the fluttering hammer-ons. so many fantastic bass parts. you can really hear his influence over late 70s&80s fahey. very much a good thing. says a lot about fahey that he adapted so well, his version of ocean waves is really good.

sete's version is much better though. he's very direct, very dynamic. none of this slow build-up biz that so many guitarists like, just straight in, back, then again. also really good at deploying slides. & stillness. this record is so full of subtle richness, chords that are just not exactly what you'd expect, but it really works. heard jungle suite/shambhala moon first but didn't get as into it as this. crystal garden sounds really good though.

summary: djalma de andrade was one of the best things to ever happen to the guitar

Apologies in advance but I'm gonna step into the middle of this Sete talk. But those who love getting temporarily far away from un-effected guitar, and haven't heard Willie Lane yet, are in dire need of grabbing his work.

Willie is kinda like the unheralded king of that small niche in pedal ridden, post-sandy bull psych zones, his work is released very sporadically but each of his three solo full lengths have been met with huge love.

His last two vinyl full lengths have been self releases, and it's fairly amazing that his stuff has been kept under the soil and aren't massively distributed. He's got a fair amount of allusive qualities to his appearances and sound as a whole. Along with what's below, I suggest his newest Cord-Art release, and a duo recording under the moniker Slurp Dogs that was put to tape by Bart at Sloow Tapes.

http://assets.boomkat.com/images/414131/333.jpg
Willie Lane - Recliner Ragas (Child of Microtones, 2006, CDR, OOP
This was recently re-released on vinyl by Rafi Bookstaber's (of Death Chants) Humito house label.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-RB8n_Yb4fmA/T87Hkr13IvI/AAAAAAAAAAM/YKmOJFFaFSk/s320/knownquantity.jpg
Willie Lane - Known Quantity (Cord-Art, 2009, LP, OOP)
One of 2009's best**

Tiny Mix Tapes Interview with Willie Lane

I like the juke joint guitarist willie lane, will have to see if I have room in my heart for a second guitarist w/ that name

Hah, yes the country blues Willie Lane is great. But this other Willie Lane is from a different planet.

Thanks for posting those Neal, been meaning to check more W. Lane out for a bit so I'll dig into these this week.

For anyone on the fence, I saw Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band on Saturday and can say that they were really good to great for the whole set. It was the first night of tour, and there were a couple of tech issues, but they seemed pretty seemlessly "on" to me. I imagine that by show three or four they are going to be really cooking. The new song I heard sounded like a mix of Mission of Burma's "All World Cowboy Romance" with some of the sweeter bluesy riffs from Led Zeppelin circa Presence, which for me is a pretty nice sweet-spot of guitar action (C. Forsyth copped to the MoB feel of the song, was definitely on board with that description). Really nice guys too.

Unfortunately my buddy who records all of the good shows here in town could not get out of his driveway, so no boots of this one.

a mix of Mission of Burma's "All World Cowboy Romance" with some of the sweeter bluesy riffs from Led Zeppelin circa Presence

^^jesus h. christ grandavis you might have just hit on a formula for my absolute ideal rock music

liked that interview w/willie lane

did some recording this weekend. the first thing is probably the first time i got close to a *sound* that i was looking for, in terms of recording, some kind of distinctive quality to the way everything sounds...it's guitar, open C9 tuning, it's on the high strings so it sounds like plinky and almost banjo-like, i think this is my most successful recording as recording, could be played a bit better but oh well

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/c9-drone

second, i'm always sort of afraid of failing as a player so i'm trying to do some more improv stuff where i'm not mapping out everything so explicitly...always been kinda scared of impov but i think this actually turned out pretty well, has it's moments i think

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/guitar-improvisation-1

and here's an electronic drone/ambient thing i did for no reason at all

http://soundcloud.com/matthew-lee-helgeson/worker-drone-1

Damn UMS, not at a place where I can listen right now but look forward to those! I am actually more scared of playing tunes straight (cause you know exactly when you flub something) than improv, which I do all the time. Trying myself to get better at just playing straight-composed stuff, i.e., having some discipline.

And yeah, that new Chris Forsyth song had me pretty psyched. Probably indicative of the direction they are going in, as it would have been written with the whole band as opposed to him solo. They have a great group sound live, and the other guitar player, Paul Sukeena, played some truly great solos/parts, truly a dual-guitar band.

bought my ticket because i had forgotten that mind over mirrors is opening
now i'm excited!

Hey guys thought I would do an update on my music and tell what I have been up to. I recorded my debut for Marmara Records who also released Daniel Bachman's "Funny How Plans Change" when I was 18 and it was released last year right after my 19th birthday. I kind of disappeared for awhile recording my second album "Five Steps" for Debacle Records who also released Daniel Bachman's "Gray Black Green" and "Oh Be Joyful" (Yes i know it looks like i am following Daniel label wise haha) I recorded the album collaborating with many heroes of mine on the music with the first half of the vinyl being all solo acoustic tracks that i wrote and the second half of the record being a four part sound and noise piece entitled "Dream Theory". They artist who collaborated on music with me on the acoustic half where none other than Mark Fosson, Chuck Johnson,Nick Jonah Davis, Steffen Basho Junghans and Danny Paul Grody.

I am really proud of how the Dream Theory side turned out with Dream Theory Part 1 being a collaboration with none other than Charles Hayward of the legendary british experimental band This Heat who where a huge influence on me through my teen years. Dream Theory Part Two is a collaboration between me and Fred Frith of sounds we both recorded making one engulfing piece of music. I was honored to record with Fred and it turned out incredible. Dream Theory Part Three is a piece composed between me and Werner "Zappi" Diermaier of the legendary krautrock band Faust and Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple. The album ends with Dream Theory Part 4 an ending ambient piece i composed with ambient innovator Robert Rich. The album will be released through Debacle this summer. I also thought i would say I finished last month compiling Imaginational Anthem Volume 7 for Tompkins Square and I think this is one of the best group of players yet for the IA series. Really excited about this year!

damn dude, looks like you are living the dream! can't wait to hear this stuff.

i'm pretty much speechless at that list of contributors. wow. very much look forward to hearing this.

lol guys don't forget i dicked around in my basement with USB mic last night! bandcamp forthcoming!!

whoa I gotta check that Dream Theory thing out

Geez dude. Looks great. Charles Hayward! Not even going to ask how this all came about, just going to wait for the (I imagine) full story to bloom when the record comes out.

Hey UMS, I definitely agree that the sound on your "C9 Drone" song is a good one. Cool tone throughout, even on my crappy headphones (cool song too). The improv definitely had its moments too, glad you threw those up. Have cycled through the C9 song a few times in a row, has a nice cyclical nature to it.

thanks :)

for no reason here's a list of all the tunings Nick Drake used if you're looking for new tunings! he used a lot of weird ones

http://www.algonet.se/~iguana/DRAKE/tunings.html

drake sort of underrated as a player, perhaps overrated as a songwriter, but i really always am impressed he tracked most of that stuff live playing and singing

Is anyone else under the inclination, and really psyched, how optimistic in nature these electric/full band "side" projects feel. More and more they seem to be popping up in the discographies of the past 3 or so years. It almost makes it seem these kind of ideas have been around a while but people had yet to put them into action. It only makes complete sense for bands like Desert Heat or the Solar Motel Band to exist.

These kind of sounds have been around for so long, yet when you look at bands such as these (who happen to contain a solo guitar member), you sort of look at them under a different light. I really don't know why this is. But having listened to the Dead way before I got into Takoma Records, it's obvious this was only a matter of time for the Dead to become a reference point among lots of solo guitar players, and that then even overlaps with the drift and drone synth communities. I always thought that there was much more of an commonality between primitive guitar and the Grateful Dead than say primitive guitar and avant/experimental music.

When Gunn's "Lurker Extended" side came out on that huge Three Lobed box, it felt so familiar and comfortable. I for one am so glad to see Gunn go in this direction, as his output, plus others, are really bringing this crowd of fans into some other place.

It's much easier to now feel like the community who follows these guitarists should actually be the ones who are labeled, instead of the music itself. Because much of these records sound nothing alike, yet carry the same fan base. I really have no idea what I'm trying to say here, but hopefully someone else can elaborate on the acceptance of the 'jam' within this group of people...

We even saw a player like Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi All Stars, who is from the 'other' community that I'm referencing here, find a home on Tompkins Square. Leo Kottke used to do sets with Mike Gordon of Phish, back in the early 2000s. Though I admit it's much easier to see Kottke do this, as it's Kottke.

There is a very specific difference between these two communities, I don't know what it is, but it surely is an amazing thing that guys like Gunn can do the things he does and it is so respectable. There has to be an element here, underground or otherwise, that I can't see. Yet that invisible element makes projects like Eternal Tapestry or the Solar Motel band, work so well with the experimental community. Is it the aesthetic that allows this, the fact that we can reference Popol Vuh, or some combination of the two?

We saw much of these modern solo guitar records built solely from the disbanded drone/improv groups of the late ninties/early 2000s. And now we're all talking about the Dead. It is shallow to distil all this in such a fashion, but it's hard to not see this transformation.

soooooo glad i saw that solar motel band/chris forsyth show -- the drummer was O_O amazing. i'm still thinking about the song he did with one arm on the shaker (for like 10 min?) and one arm everywhere else. awesome show.

"Paranoid Cat Part. I" is a jam for sure: https://soundcloud.com/#solar-motel-band/paranoid-cat-part-1

That is a live version with said drummer by the way, pretty sure he does the shaker trick in that version as well.

that guy rules. i was going to say thank you after the show but i was embarrassed and he seemed exhausted. thanks for the live version!!

Sure, lots of good stuff on that soundcloud page. Hopefully there will be sets from that tour posted at some point. That guy is really nice by the way, I talked to him for a while at the show here in Charlottesville (he grew up very close to here, his parents were at the show!).

nice post Neal, food for thought and maybe I will have a response at some point

grandavis I just sent you a PM

Got it sleeve! Will be in touch via email.

Got a few things to say about that post as well Neal, will get my thoughts down when I have a little more time. I am, for sure, very into and excited by all of the collaboration happening.

Hey Neal, some beginning thoughts here.

First, I think for a lot of the older dudes (Forsyth is 40, Tom Carter), the Grateful Dead has always been a touchstone. For me personally it has always been there as well, but I am older and just grew up in a place where tons of folks were into the Dead. I got into a lot of weird stuff over the years, and tried to turn folks into the Dead onto it (with very little luck), but most folks I know who like truly weird/out/heavy drone stuff like the Dead on at least some level. But yeah, "primitive guitar" has a lot more in common with the general lyrical quality of the playing in the Dead (and their folk/jazz/blues-leaning tunes) then more avant/experimental music, though I sure tried to sell Dead folks on the expansive side of Sonic Youth by saying it was like the good feedback/space interludes or at times the really out Dark Stars or something, but this rarely worked.

I do think a lot of it is timing, i.e., the timing is right now for a lot of this stuff to coalesce and bloom around what these folks are up to. I mean, Chasny, Tom Carter, Rick Bishop, the No-Neck folks, and even Forsyth, have been around for a good while collaborating and playing with other folks all the time (obviously Carter, with Charalambides, and Chasny, with Comets on Fire/Badgerlore/Rangda etc., have high-profile projects) but the current, slightly younger crop of heavy hitters, Gunn/Bowles/Cian Nugent etc., are just now getting more publicity for their efforts in that area, and seem to universally be turning to classic group-sound jamming as an outlet as opposed to drone/noise-a-thons and free-er improv stuff, though most of these folks dip their toes in that water as well (they just don't get as much run for it right now).

As far as who else is paying attention, and the respectability a dude like Gunn has universally achieved, I don't know, I think it is just the moment we are in. A lot of it is a taste level maybe, in that a lot of these folks have ingested a ton of music and are generally avoiding some of the cornier, least appealing sides of the historical touchstones, but it is also just natural "ideas bubbling to the surface" kind of stuff. I know I got sick of somewhat anti-technique noise shows and straight drone, just because that was a huge part of what was coming through my town/I went to see live for a while, and a lot of the bands who jumped into that scene weren't doing much with it after a while. To see someone incorporate more musicality into the equation was pretty welcome, but even still, there were bands touring throughout the early to late '00s that worked similar weins (Jackie O Motherfucker, MV & EE, Chasny's various efforts), so why is it being more widely recognised now? Not sure. I mean, I don't remember a time when I didn't know someone who wasn't a big Bardo Pond fan, and my friends all dug Sonic Youth's Murray Street, but certainly most of them were not asking me about my Dead bootlegs, though most didn't toe the "I hate the Dead" line that fully either.

Feel like Solar Motel owes way more to Television than the Dead.... And Forsythe studied guitar with Richard Lloyd iirc...

Neil def agree w the idea that the audience is easier to label than the music, which is increasingly varied

xp oh for sure, but forsyth is a huge deadhead, though.
good posts from neal and grandavis! i think i floated the totally gross term "post-classic-rock" here or somewhere, but that's the vibe I get from these full-band records (gunn, nugent, forsyth etc). expansive w/o being bloated, fully embracing the rock band dynamic without having to stick to rock band structures. in some weird way I feel like it's almost similar to the hard bop era, when jazz was sort of freed from the pop song format and could stretch out. maybe that doesn't make sense, not sure.

I think having a strong and inventive drummer has a lot to do with it! at least that's in part why i like these bands. i also like shreddy instrumentals and anything that sounds remotely like Crazy Horse, preferably if there is no singing.

One thing I really like about Forsyth's band is that they ride the line of structure, soloing/improvising, and getting slightly unhinged here and there really well. Very seldomly did I feel like they weren't going "somewhere" or were just soloing to take a guitar solo, it all felt pretty organic whilst retaining the thrills of hearing folks go for it on their instruments a bit and try to push the music energy- and structure-wise.

I agree though, generally more TV than GD in the overall sound.

Basically what you said way more succinclty Tyler: expansive without being bloated.

By the way, the other guitarist in Forsyth's band, Paul Sukeena, kept teasing "Disconnection Notice" by SY in their soundcheck at the show. My secret dream of Murray Street influencing a slew of rock bands/players maybe coming true!

Rangda, Bishop, & Sun City Girls figure into this somehow too I think

yeah I view this whole scene as an evolution on from the whole New Weird America thing, which the SCG folks were like the grandfathers of

is this the only thread that works?

lol

Haha I think so...
The prophecy has been fulfilled

omg how did you do this?

Seems to be.

Ok, carry on discussing the Alex Turner speech here.

the transfiguration of ILX

aw, don't ruin this great thread :(

yes i don't want anyone to come here to talk about zombies and bacon, keep it strictly to the ILX brigade

Hah no idea what just happened here, but brief interlude to announce that Dying For Bad Music has just announced via Twitter that they are going to release a full-length this year from our own Global Tetrahedron. Very cool!

Link?

using this thread to talk about the subject of this thread while the rest of ilx is broken seems in pretty bad taste imo

xp - oooh! that's cool!

You have to be "jumped in" to the gang before you can post. Basically we beat you with Leo Kottke records (but only the early stuff)