But it’s her sense of time-contracting, expanding, quickening, slowing-that feels revelatory here, as if she exists at a flexible nexus of the past, present, and future.
#Doltary experiments mind over matter album art full#
Anderson, on the other hand, steadily plucks an electric, her patient melodies curling from thick strings with full body. Still, these songs somehow maintain a sense of melody, where the tune itself matters just as much as the texture it conjures. Dorji explores his acoustic as if it’s an unmapped territory: During his three songs, he picks up the slide, scrapes the strings, plays thin notes, offers broad chords, chimes out harmonics and rattles around the neck. Maybe by coincidence, maybe not, Footfalls Records broadens the scope of practitioners with its debut release, a two-guitarist split between the Bhutan-born Tashi Dorji and Oregon’s Marisa Anderson. The realm of solo instrumental guitar music is typically dominated by white male musicians. Oren Ambarchi & Jim O'Rourke: "Behold (excerpt)" Listening to this is like sitting in a museum and staring at a painting, noticing new layers and elements even though you know it and you remain still. The piece accomplishes a lot even as it goes almost nowhere, with Ambarchi and O’Rourke electing to accessorize and fill in their simple rhythmic design rather than force it into new shapes.
A two-side set of slow-moving, groove-oriented tones and drones, peaks and lulls, Behold suggested a jam band working to adhere to several tenets of modern design-clean lines with negative space, striking colors, and an understandable palette. But earlier in the year, O’Rourke and the musician who has become perhaps his closest collaborator-the drummer, guitarist, and sound artist Oren Ambarchi-issued Behold, their second duo album. The year’s big Jim O’Rourke news, of course, came with May’s release of Simple Songs, his long-awaited return to discrete and discernible songcraft, where reflections of Van Dyke Parks were more apparent than his love of, say, Akos Rozmann.