Guitar Week - Day 1

by Nick Ostrum 

Guillaume Gargaud and Eero Savela – Syyspimee (Ramble Records, 2023)

This one escaped me last year. However, it seems to have been released on Bandcamp just this year, so I will include it in this year’s guitar week.

Guillaume Gargaud is French guitarist, who, despite release with the late Burton Greene I covered a few years ago for FreeJazzBlog, has over 35 releases under his belt. Finnish trumpeter Eero Savela was previously unknown to me, though a quick internet search shows he has been quite active in live performances, especially in various forms of dance, theater and even circuses. This is their second duo release, the first being 2020’s Helsinki.

There is a real ease to this music. The title, Syyspimee, is Finnish for “the darkness of autumn,” but this is a calm darkness, a welcome extended twilight after an active summer. I hesitate to go much further along this somnolent line, however, as the music is not sleepy or enervated or boring. IT is just relaxed. Both musicians display a range of techniques, some conventional, some less so. However, the volleys of sound, the vining of guitar and trumpet runs, the skill and vision behind the deceptive veil of simplicity make this one stand out. Gargaud lays an almost classical progression on his acoustic guitar, Savela responds with a series of smokey spirals. Gargaud responds with another slowhand lick and Savela, with a jaunt that evokes a smokey Miles or Chet Baker. If this loose serenity is what this autumn holds, I happily bid summer adieu.

Syysipmeeis available as a CD and download on Bandcamp.

 

Eldritch Priest – Dormitive Virtue (Halocline Trance, 2024)

 

Eldritch Priest, composer and guitarist who released the infectious Omphaloskepsis two years ago is back with another solo effort. This one, Dormitive Virtue , focuses less on earworms, and leans much harder into layers of riffing and light feedback. There is a fine line between noodling and this type of performance, and that line seems to consist of intentionality and dedication to a motif and mood. Priest strides the right side of this divide.

Dormitive virtue refers to opium’s hypnogogic properties, which invite the blurring of sleep and hallucination. I am not sure how this would sound in an altered state, but it is certainly mesmerizing. Each of its eight tracks sucks the listener into its frequently liquid sound world. The guitar is measured and spacey, flickering like an ill-defined and distant star or blurred like a moon lightly covered by a gauze of cloud. The music sounds composed, if not on paper than at least in Priest’s head, but follows no regular pattern. And, as with Omphaloskepsis, there are sections that are so rich (think the more elevating moments of Kraftwerk) that they border on juicy pleasures.

Dormitive Virtueis available as a slick-looking vinyl and download from Bandcamp.

 

Eyal Maoz and Eugene Chadbourne – The Coincidence Masters (Infrequent Seams, 2024)

Here is another review of a guitar duo that does not disappoint. Eugene Chadbourne, of course is a freakabilly, radical country, free improv extraordinaire. Eyal Maoz might have less of a reputation, but that is no reflection of his wide musical interests (rock, reggae, Jewish/Eastern European folk traditions, reggae, free jazz [of course]) nor of his playing.

From the first notes of The Coincidence Masters,Chadbourne leans on the avant-garde of his unique syntax and Maoz holds his own. That sounds too combative, though. On any of these pieces Maoz and Chadbourne seem of like mind, playing a combination of straightforward picking and augmented chords and piercing shreds. Much of this is comparatively relaxed, a front porch jam just when the alien vessel arrives. O, maybe a dazed contemplation of the constellations, complete with heavy connotations of just how ethereal and strange that process can be. (For those to whom this means something, I cannot shake the thought that this might be, even subconsciously or mistakenly, a meditation on the Flatlanders’ The Stars in My Life, albeit without the groove and vocals, and chopped up, processed, digested, and distorted almostbeyond recognition.) Anyway, this one is a real standout in its skill and understated oddity. Rock on, Eyal and Chad, and watch out for those tractor beams.

The Coincidence Masteris available as a CD and download from Bandcamp. 

 

Elliot Sharp, Sally Gates, Tashi Dorji – Ere Guitar (Intakt, 2024)

To paraphrase Ash Williams when confronted with a triad of Necronomica in Army of Darkness, “Three guitars? Nobody said anything about three guitars? Like what am I supposed to follow one guitar, or all guitars, or what?”

The second installment of Elliot Sharp’s E(e)r(e) Guitar presents the listener with that conundrum. This time with Sally Gates and Tashi Dorji, the answer is, well, opaque. Ere Guitaris a cauldron of electric whirling, twirling and more general electro-rummage cacophony. One almost immediately loses track of which guitarist is playing which line, as everything mixes in the same stew. Flecks and shards of atmospherics bleed in and out of the background, as one guitarist, then another steps in to shred, or lay out a fusillade of clicks and plinks. Some parts, such as the beginning of Survey the Damage – incidentally the longest cut on the album – adopt a darker mood, laying drones on feedback. Then, however, the shocks of sound emerge, jetting back and forth and tearing into the gloomy tonal canvas. Then, the striated shocks open to finer moments of precision etching and, more often, blunter ones of gouges and scrapes, and the clunky repeating click of an engine. I am not sure what Ash would have made of this, especially way back in 1992, when the film came out, or the generic medieval setting in which it took place. That said, this would have been a fitting soundtrack at least to his journey through the time portal from one to the other. Just awesome.

Ere Guitar is available as a CD or download from Bandcamp.