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

Enjoying the hell out of the new Rob Noyes album. I love his style, definitely hits a lot of sweet spots for me. Just love the logic and patterns/phrasing in his playing (and lots of rhythmic stuff going on that really charges it with cool energy):

https://robnoyesvdsq.bandcamp.com/

Probably my favorite straight-acoustic-guitar record I have heard in a bit.

oh cool, yeah I find Rob to be a singular talent, he really has his own voice as a player

Yeah I agree. This record rips, and lots of short songs too which is kind of refreshing.

interesting piece of Loren Connors who I was not familiar with, but seems very interesting

https://daily.bandcamp.com/lifetime-achievement/loren-connors-lifetime-achievement

connors is kind of his own universe — tons of good stuff (and I've probably only heard 1/10 of what he's put out over th years)

Yeah I never got too into him but I really like Airs in particular.

Oh man Loren is one of my dudes (not that I have heard even near everything, there is a lot). That Bandcamp piece is good though, Grayson did a good job with it. Think I maybe heard about him first from the Harmony of the Spheres box set?

I really love this album of his, just beautifully impressionistic playing, for lack of a better descriptor:

https://lorenconnorsnyc.bandcamp.com/album/red-mars

Definitely paved the way for a whole lot of moves people are taking liberally from, including myself.

Guys I have problem. I don’t think I remember how to play guitar and not sound like New Arrivals by Willie Lane

good problem to have imo

Hah playing guitar is a problem. You are always going to sound like someone for the most part .... but yeah I agree that sounding like Willie Lane sounds like a good problem to have.

Well it just always falls into that sort of formless wandering thing complete with that kind of cool but kind of shitty electric guitar sound. Framed it as a problem because I honestly wonder if I'll ever be able to focus enough to "compose" something ever again or if I'm cursed to forever jam aimlessly in avant post-primitivism mode with wacky tunings.

Welcome, friend hah hah.

My movement out of these waters a bit is finding myself being interested in the texture and phrasing that you can exaggerate a bit more by playing loudly. Kind of find myself almost playing "noise" at times but don't think of it that way while I am doing it. Just kind of finding some of that territory that you can to where the freeform, wandering notes start to take on a life of there own via feedback/overdrive/fuzz etc. I have been really enjoying it!

was exploring this global radio google maps overlay, where you can click on a station anywhere in the world and stream.

http://radio.garden/

was randomly clicking around oceania, landed on what turned out to be easter island. they were playing PETER LANG. absolutely one-in-a-million chance. i took lessons with the guy! he is not particularly famous!

wow that's wild

we should put on a american primitive/psych/weirdo fest on easter island

Neat site! Love Peter Lang... wonder how he is doing. Always confused when reminded that The Thing At The Nursery Room Window is not as sought after as one might think.

grandavis- sounds like fun! Though it also sounds a little like what someone says when they're essentially stumbling upon shoegaze? Like, the good'n messy experimental post-punk version of shoegaze not the glossy version.

Also yeah my brain ignored your actual point... easter island? WTF/cool.

Speaking of stylistic overlap and islands in the middle of the ocean I really love slack key guitar too.

that site is fucking amazing

it really is

we might need a thread for that site, finding some great stuff. favorite so far is 'dago radio sound' in the capital of madagascar, been playing some unidentifiable rap and now some local folk music

agreed ^ i just immediately went to stations i already know are great. would love to see a running list of folks' discoveries...

Radio.Garden - Streamable Global Radio Google Maps Overlay

Hah yeah Evan you are correct that this "move" is not new either, which goes back to the original premise that "playing guitar is a problem" hah hah. I was more suggesting as someone who has played for a long time and finds myself in patterns that aren't always easy to break out of, this shift has been interesting as it has taken phrases and habits of mine that were feeling pretty set in stone at times and put them in a new light. Hopefully it does not sound like shitty shoegaze without the rest of the band hah hah, but I mean it might.

Yeah for sure! It's a good tip. I'm so very much not a gear head though so I am shy about playing with knobs since I don't have good luck getting the sounds I want. Someday I'll "find" some cool new-to-me effects and have a blast and it'll jostle me out of my typical mode. In the meantime my Canyon pedal is my favorite to fool around with.

here's my big roundup of recent guitar things ... not sure if any of it will be new to y'all, but maybe!
https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2021/02/16/transfigurations-2021-recent-recommended-21st-century-guitar/

Nice roundup Tyler, definitely a couple of things in there I have not checked out yet. Also just lots of good stuff, I am into more than a few of these.

The Canyon pedal looks cool. I keep thinking about getting a real reverb pedal, as seeing Jon Collin live (electric version), and being a fan of Loren Connors, makes me want to have way more options there than I do (my amp has reverb and is OK but nothing like the depths you can get with a good pedal or other options). Probably will at some point.

cool primer on Takoma that highlights a couple obscure releases I was unfamiliar with

https://insheepsclothinghifi.com/takoma-records-retrospective/

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'