Across a lifetime of solo sets, duo collabs, and memberships in larger ensembles, the veteran improviser’s tool (belt) [box] {shed} accumulates an inventory of performance tactics capable of fitting his or her output into any live context. On a practical level, these tools can manifest as effect pedal configurations or chord shapes, beloved synth patches or looping strategies — but the most important tactics, the ones that separate the upstart zoners from the deep heads, float on a more ethereal wavelength as the energy shared between oneself and others. Without a sense of teamwork, of selflessness within a group, one member can seize and scorch a session into something best left solo. If all of its participants strive for selflessness, we experience the delight of an absence of individual ego, and glimpse the spector of a mutual presence: a two- or three- or eight-headed chimera compiled of knobs, voices, keys, strings.
As a founder of long-running psych/drone explorers Charalambides and an endless roster of solo and collab projects, Tom Carter has pushed his fringe guitar performance through filters of atonality and loop/delay-based self accompaniment over more than one hundred physical releases, channeling the idiosyncratic strategies of forebears like Loren Connors or Derek Bailey into his own vision of fretboard freedom. Pat Murano adds volume after volume to his expansive solo catalog under the Decimus moniker, while infusing his unpredictable synth murk, hallucinatory lo-fi textures, and primal rhythms into the mighty No-Neck Blues Band. The New York City-based duo’s sidelong collaborative sessions on the upcoming Four Infernal Rivers span a wide palette of improvised atmospheres, from queasy trudges through darkened alleyways to bright-eyed drone hosannas. Their generative lattice of overlapping guitar loops, electronic pulses, and muffled rhythms provide each musician with a swath of the stereophonic spread to color without being too closely moored to the other, opening them up to meld their fried leads into a conjoined sear.
The 20 time-stretching minutes of Four Infernal Rivers B-side “Cocytus,” premiering below, begin in a murmur and swell to a roar as Murano low end surges buttress Carter’s self-consuming distorted shred. The session gathers looped layers into its open maw, alternately ruminating on its recursive elements and spewing new leads into the haze. For every passage of screeching guitar (anti)heroics that splinter the session down the center, a dose of warped synth (anti)melody bids it to crawl back into the underground cavern from which it slithered — as two minds and twenty fingers fused into one quivering mass.
Four Infernal Rivers lands on June 16 in an edition of 500 2xLP via London’s MIE Music. You can preorder it now.
• Tom Carter: http://www.wholly-other.com/tom_carter.html
• Pat Murano: http://decimus.bandcamp.com/album/tom-carter-pat-murano
• MIE Music: http://mie.limitedrun.com/
More about: Tom Carter & Pat Murano
