N.O. Moore/ John Edwards/ Eddie Prévost - Darkened, Yet Shone (Matchless Recordings, 2019) *****

By Stuart Broomer

There’s always some special interest in hearing a musician freshly arrived, more so when the musician is in company as elevated as bassist John Edwards and drummer Eddie Prévost. I suspect, though, that guitarist N.O. Moore would likely attract some attention in any fit company, for he brings a highly personal conception to an instrument often sullied by redundancy.

Moore is an electronic guitarist, a musician whose sounds include ones you wouldn’t necessarily assume are coming from guitar, including some that sound like radio waves, oscillator or synthesizer. At the same time, he eschews effects like looping, instead fixing his playing, as one might assume from his partners here, very much in real time. That quality of his playing, in fact, its nowness, is so strong that after repeated listening to the four tracks of this CD, I don’t have a strong sense of each track’s shape, as if the immediate attention demanded by the music’s instants precludes the imposition of larger temporal patterns, while simultaneously contributing to an ultimate coherence. Listening to this music, one is absorbed in this music, like one of André Breton’s soluble fish.

Moore combines with his sonic arsenal a sense of detailed nuance, subtle shifts in picking and fingering, that unites the trio in its sense of living and interactive detail. The play of volume and timbre extends throughout the group, so that their are patterns of resemblance beyond physical differences. Edwards’ range of arco effects and Prévost’s cymbals and tight snare often cross through Moore’s electronics, creating both strange ambiguities and a special fellowship.

Mindstreaming for metaphors for the way Moore approaches the guitar, I had a sudden flash…it’s as if John Milton or William Blake returned to earth and, finding language exhausted and bereft of sense, turned instead to the electric guitar. There must be something in that slightly skewed title. Googling (both cause and answer to said exhaustion and sense-paucity) for some imagined confirmation, I find, after a few entries for the release of this CD, two germane quotations, one from Milton (Book 1 of Paradise Lost, lines 597-604)—

In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations, and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs: darkened so yet shone
Above them all the Archangel; but his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrenched, and care
Set on his faded cheek, but under brows
Of dauntless courage and considerate pride,
Waiting revenge.

and perhaps its source:

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that well in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. (Isaiah 9:2)

That contrast of darkness and shining is everywhere in the contrast of acoustic and electronic sound patterns here, but it also speaks to the bright intensity of the music’s ongoing interaction and the mystery of its larger structures, including, perhaps, the grim embrace of the historical moment.