Greg Baker, Subversion

Greg Baker is a very versatile, very accomplished guitarist. We have met with his playing on Gapplegate blogs in association with the composer Gene Pritzker, most spectacularly on an album Greg made of Pritsker's solo guitar music, reviewed on these pages on November 29, 2010.

Greg has a new one out, Subversion (Composers Concordance 008). It's rather different than his earlier recording, in that it is a multi-tracked guitars, bass, beats affair in a prog rock-avant-bag. It shows Greg in a more multi-layered kind of post-Beefheart/post-League of Crafty Guitarists mode with electric and acoustic instruments separately and in combination.

Guitarists and their friends will certainly have much to appreciate here. He is well along the way to his own contrapuntal kind of art-rock.

Give it a listen and you will find some surprising juxtapositions and very interesting guitar work.

Spokanarchy! Where Were You in '82?

Punk. Where were you when it emerged? Some were in Spokane, Washington, a sort of one-horse center in those days, isolated and culturally a bit backward.

Spokanarchy (Carnage & Rouge) tells the story of the advent of punk in Spokane in a full-length documentary DVD that focuses on extensive, rather insightful interview footage interspersed with clips of the bands that made what impact they could in that town in the '80s.

The emphasis is on Spokane punk as a lifestyle, a protest against conformity, an anti-establishment expression that flowered, held steady and ultimately became a part of history in the teeth of exceptional hostility.

It wasn't so much about musicianship per se, as the interviews make pretty clear. It was a DIY artistic-social movement that attempted to rise out of the ashes of crushing boredom, teetered and turned for a time into a set of activities that were strongly determined, then fell apart gloriously like the mechanical toys of the '50s.

In the process you experience an excellent documentary that will keep you thinking about it all for years to come. It may not get you to go out and get the Sex Pistols box set if you haven't already. It might make you curious to explore the bands from Spokane from that era. But most importantly it will give you a feel for the punks of backwater America, their courage, their despair, their constructive-destructive mindset.

A must for students of the counter-culture and modern cultural history.

Roman Stolyar and Dominic Duval, Park West Suite

Back to the improvisational arts today. And as for that there is a very good place to be with Roman Stolyar and Dominic Duval's new program, Park West Suite (Cadence Jazz Records). It's a substantial program of free-wheeled improvisational duets with Dominic D of course on contrabass and Roman Stolyar at the piano.

Maestro Duval remains one of the most original, most accomplished bassists in the improvisational world of today. Roman Stolyar is a pianist with various influences (clearly Cecil Taylor, perhaps a bit of Jarrett in his more outre moments, new music performance practices, etc.), which he harnesses for an organic style that is not eclectic as much as it is respectful of those who came before but determined to plow a singular furrow, so to say.

It's a near-hour of the two conjuring up forward moving modes that have room for contemplation at points. Dominic is in top form, playing a great deal of well-thought out bass alternating with space and sound-color moments of relative restfulness.

Mr. Stolyar impresses with good use of motifs, droning full-piano sonances, prepared and inside-the-piano chimes, cosmic whirligigs of turbulence, exploratory moments of spontaneous freedom, and scalular, tone-centered rubatos.

This is a very impressive set--Duval sounds inspired by Stolyar's all-over pianism; Stolyar gets much to interact with from Dominic's explosive bass-mastering.

These two would make a fabulous trio with the addition of a very musical, keenly attuned drum master. But there is so much going on already one certainly feels no lack. Excellent disk!

Grimes, Visions

I had meant to review this one Friday, but a miscue in my logistical work flow forced me to postpone until today. We have Canadian performing artist-vocalist-instrumental-electronician Claire Boucher as Grimes, and her album Visions (4 AD).

My first reaction on hearing it was, "What is this?" Well, it's a kind of joyfully mindless yet cosmically spaced beats-ambiance-pop I guess. The female vocals have the slightest J-pop playfulness to them, but combine that with Bjork and you get what this is--deceptive pop with a bit of a kick.

The synth beats tracks are not cliche and the singsong vocals with heavy echo make you feel as if you are in a futuristic dream.

But it's mindless pop. But it isn't quite. So I like it, in spite of my potential aversion to something like this. It's musical. And a little bit out there in its own way. That's why I decided to mention it. I am glad to hear it. Seems like good summer driving to the beach sort of stuff, but spacey too.

Starving Weirdos, Land Lines

Land Lines (Amish) is the California band Starving Weirdos's latest. It is a statement over and above what one would expect. It has long, creeped-out electronic sprawls that hit in a post-psychedelic way. It blends wall-of-sound soundscape with Javanese nightmare vocals.

It's heavily multi-layered, weird symphonic collaged sectional mastery for your ears. It is ethnic music from another planet. It drones, feeds into itself, rites its post-spring, echoes against the universal container tank.

Towards the end, there is a kind of Nico night of the living live kind of song that fits in nicely, still dense as all get-out.

There are some Indian influences here articulated among the jungle of sustained sound.

Wow. If you like weirdness as a kind of thick-carpeted orchestral-electronic expansiveness, here it is. Impressive cacophony!

Ceremony, Zoo, Hard Rock from California

When the hard-edged, power-chording wall of sound guitar band thing is done right, it is an art form. "Who cares?" some might ask. Well now, I do. When the world of music has such a gaggle of styles going on all at the same time, every genre has a few examples of its peculiarities at its best, and those are the ones I tend to like, obviously. Along with innovation wherever it may occur.

So I like Ceremony. I like their album Zoo (Matador) because it is all that I'm talking about above. It's not just a bunch of power chords and some hard-shouting vocals. It hangs together. It rocks with energy. It has a quasi-punk aggressiveness. "Post-hardcore" is what somebody called it on a Google listing I passed by on my way to get the cover art. Well, OK. What the "post" part may be I am not actually sure about. No death-exorcist vocals? Arrangements that have space in them? And there's a hint of punk-surf-retro too. Maybe.

The point is that this is a good band, doing what they do with enough variety that it goes beyond formula. So that works for me. You judge for yourself.

Anna Borges & Bill Ward, Receita de Samba

Lovers of jazz samba will get 32 minutes of good music on Anna Borges & Bill Ward's Receita de Samba (self released).

Anna has a nicely tuned and rhythmically hip vocal style, within classic parameters but with her own kind of warmth. Bill Ward plays quite nicely on the nylon stringed guitar, samba-bossa style, and he can sing too.

They get a small, good rhythm section together for the album and give a light but heated reading of some wonderful samba tunes.

Oh yeah, this is nice. Very, very nice!