It’s the rare occasion where the husband-and-wife-as-musical-recording-duo makes sense, but Nonconnah chucks convention so freaking hard out the window you’d be forgiven for thinking actual shattered glass would rain down on the street below and injure some innocent passerby. It’s a metaphor, you know; Nonconnah didn’t ACTUALLY throw anything. It just seemed like they did.
I don’t even know what the “convention” might look like – Fleetwood Mac? Sonic Youth? Whatever, point is, Zach Corsa was once Lost Trail, an electronic/experimental/ambient tour de force, but then he just … shut it down. With the help of his wife Denny, he ratcheted the ol’ creative juices back up, and the two of them became Nonconnah, a slightly more whimsical (maybe…) ambient/sound art/experinoisic tour de force. The newfound artistic “oneness” allowed their ingenuity to flow unhindered from one mind to the other. It’s the same kind of oneness I get when I go to the beach with a dog, but I’m not exactly the creative type.
No convention, then. None whatsoever.
So Dead Roses, Digged Up Zombies, Broken Pieces of Diamonds, Live Cats is not a lost Cap’n Jazz record despite the title; instead, it turns out to be Nonconnah’s “first truly realized project,” even though a quick glance at their Bandcamp page would suggest otherwise. (Seriously, between that page and Lost Trail’s, it’s like the Corsas have been around forever.) Featuring a vast array of guests adding all sorts of color to Nonconnah’s compositions, Dead Roses includes in its liners luminaries such as Kenneth William (White Lung), Lord Goldston (Nirvana – but on cello), Greg Saunier (Deerhoof), Jim Schoenecker (Volcano Choir, Collections of Colonies of Bees), AJ Annunziata (Sannhet), Dan Friel (solo music god, Parts & Labor, Upper Wilds), Dustin Wong (Ponytail), as well as other frequent collaborators such as Scott Cortez, Alyse Lamb, and CJ Boyd. The result is never less than sonic feast covered in the best condiments, sometimes all at once (like ketchup and marmalade et al.), sometimes more judiciously applied (maybe just some mustard).
Dead Roses, Digged Up Zombies, Broken Pieces of Diamonds, Live Cats drops March 15 on Ernest Jenning Record Co., and you can catch Nonconnah at SXSW if you’re in Austin and have a taste for barbecue and INSANE CROWDS. If not, just sit back, relax, and check out album opener “Rainbow Over Pegasus Field” and the Greg Saunier collaboration “To Pass Through the Walls and Vanish” below.
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