Banning + Center
(Experimental Music Research) Used CD $8.00
“Recorded live at Line Space Line in Los Angeles in January 2005, Banning + Center employs treatments, effects, distortions, and an ever-present sense of structure, purpose, and articulation. The dominant sound is abrasive, and during occasional passages of quiet reflection, a howl of feedback or over-amped chording is never far away, giving the entire album an unpredictability that makes it edge-of-the-seat listening.”
Buried on Bunker Hill
(Groundfault) CD $12.00
Guitarist Nels Cline and bassist Devin Sarno have been playing together for almost 10 years, and this is their first multitrack recording (their past collaborations have been live). With a focus on improvisation and texture, Buried on Bunker Hill rumbles thick, low and foggy, as Cline’s detuned and bent guitar mechanics gravitate, distort, meander and hover. For fans of Labradford, Flying Saucer Attack, and the like. Easily the best recording by a duo with chemistry to burn.
GREG CAMPBELL / NELS CLINE / WALLY SHOUP
Suite: Bittersweet
(Strange Attractors) Used LP $12.00
Incendiary playing and massively inventive improvisation recorded at Sonarchy Radio, Seattle, in 2007, shifting from break-neck free-jazz to more minimalist, esoteric fare.
NELS CLINE / MY CAT IS AN ALIEN
The Ocean Above Your Heads
(Starlight Furniture Company - *26) LP $15.00
This first-time collaboration by Italy’s premier transcenders of time and space and guitarist extraordinaire from Wilco, Scarnella, Nels Cline Singers, and L. Stinkbug throbs like an Argento soundtrack for an astral perv lair, recalling vintage cassette gorp from the golden age of Industrial, when field recordings of howling dogs were repurposed as documents of institutional degradation and mind control. The Opalio brothers improvise an instant composition with the first-time playback of Cline's prerecorded space noise, bold cosmic disruptions, and nattering squibs from decommissioned satellites. No overdubs, no second takes, no leftovers. Dusted with loops from a lunar cathedral where palsied zombies dragging pots and pans skid across the soap-slathered narthex, The Ocean Above Your Heads splays the hemispheres better than Subotnik goin’ off his meds.