Reviews: Shawn David McMillan - Dead Friends / Various Artists - Beyond Berkeley Guitar
john fahey went insane in nineteen sixty four and died shortly thereafter. he spoke to me in his last minutes on his dying bed and said: “take down my old guitar and smash it against the wall so i can die easy.” i did so and he passed away with a chthonic smile on his face.
not just a musically contextual quote but one that echoes the themes (one assumes…) of mortality, death, time, remembrance on shawn david mcmillen’s new record - y’know, walking home at the end of the night, no time left in this place, a morning with dead friends.
and while old fahey may have bitten the big one corporeally, his silky snakelike digits continue wriggling under the skin of all these modern day string-wranglers and geetar alchemists.
exemplified by the near-peerless tompkins square. one foot in the past, one in the future and one toes deep in the underground betwixt the two. yup a frazzled lovecraftian three-legged beast, based in new york, with tendrils snaking out here to texas and california. it’s a label i love for its confusingness. sure the beyond berkeley record gets all takoma on our asses and there’s plenty dusty old blues tropes creaking out of dead friends, but there’s also schmearings of tape klank and instro-mangling mandalas, like greaseless gear changes among the simplicity of fingers, steel and wood.
these goofy bits wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the live at the accident mélange mcmillen did with starving weirdoes and tom carter. that was a right jammy rum bugger, a liberally oiled wolf-eyes-in-cashmere-sweaters orchestral bliss freakshow. being all anonymized i have no (un)earthly clue who played what, so sdm’s input could’ve been anything from a churn of samples to a billowing of live strings to tape and reel molestation.
which is pretty close to what’s going on here. from bucolic rickets of fiddles on no time left in this place and creaky porch ragas, woozy veers between jandek and cooder and neil young’s dead man soundtrack meanderings to calliopes of layered reel-to-reel wonk or sun city girls-esque kalimba spanks and old blooze moans.
it’s from texas by god and won’t you just know that after a listen or two.
and continuing with this sense of psycho-geographical displacement is the beyond berkeley guitars compilation. total takoma records vibe on this sequel of sorts to the 2006 berkeley guitar comp. (which ed denson wrote the liner notes for). this eschews the chimera and chiaroscuro of mcmillen’s folk skronk with some straightforwardly virtuoso american primitive. belongs as much to the berkley of robbie basho and bukka white and john fahey as mcmillen does to the texas of butthole surfers and zz top and van zandt. flip sides of the same coin, spiritually, geographically and aurally.
i’ve always dug the post-reflexive qualities of thiskindofthing. always seemed like an attempt to transcend, to get beyond, to get you, as player, as listener, lost and traveling in the mental thrum, pick and bend of strings; where fingers seem fluid, liquid, graceful, rippling along frets with unthought and deceptive ease.
so seven tracks from seven artists. aaron sheppard opens proceedings with the shortest and to the pointest track. two and half minutes of arpeggiated pacing. richard osborn indulges the basho raga. nine minutes of a dream of distant summer, which is as hazy and contemplative as the title suggests. all free and new and loose with the rasa flowing and unfurling, evolving then turning back in on itself moebius-like. trevor healy and chuck johnson bring hints of their avant/classical /rock/composition backgrounds. just hints mind. sean smith, curator, liner notes writer and all round chief of this record carves out the longest and arguably most complex piece. a two part exploratory surgery of compositional grace and metaphysics. lucas boilon offers up the gnarliest title and another shorter number with studies of the oak as pertaining to druidic rites of passion, which reads like a stephen o’malley song and sounds like something equally airy and ancient. and last but in no ways least ava mendoza (yes an actual xx chromosome among xy dominated musical dna). the highlight of the compilation for me. proffering a lilting, lolloping, djazzy, django flecked swirl of grasping blues. like an unloved balloon falling high into the sky, string and ribbon trailing twirling desperately towards the cold earth, lifting ever higher knowing that only exquisite doom awaits…
or maybe that’s just me.
[Dead Friends and Beyond Berkeley Guitar are both out now on Tompkins Square]
Posted in Music & Reviews by marxsbeard on June 21, 2010.
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