♫♪  Cara & Mike Gangloff - “When It’s Sleepytime Down South”

Following 2014’s Black Ribbon of Death, Silver Thread of Life, Cara & Mike Gangloff’s new MIE release, Knock on Life’s Door, is a journey shared with over a dozen guest musicians, collectively called the Great American Drone Orchestra. The Gangloffs and company circle worn-safe American Songbook standards, looking for a stray thread that can be pulled to unraveling. Precious stones are pried from their settings, then un-cut, then returned underground. Roots look like lightning. Are we hearing a song restored to its original energy, or riding entropy out as far as possible? Yes we are.

“Cara and Mike Gangloff have married the colloquial with the eternal,” points out Matt Krefting. Watch it happen in “When It’s Sleepytime Down South,” a 1930s standard that became a favorite of Louis Armstrong. In a nod to encoded folk arts besides music, quilt imagery abounds. These social fabrics are superimposed, blurred, and layered to the point of pulsing. Textile becomes texture, a visual parallel to the track’s instrumentational strata. Warm hugs, campfires, playing music outside: a celebration indeed, though perhaps tinged with melancholy, depending if it’s being experienced now or held in memory. Proof that time is a precondition of history and drone alike.

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

Most Read



Etc.