Zarabatan – O Terceiro Corno #agiantfern 2017 Portugal #YawTembe – flugelhorn, percussion and voice #BernardoÁlvares – double-bass, balafon and voice #CarlosGodinho – percussion and voice Recorded in Sintra Mountains and later mixed and mastered in Goela by Fernando Fadigas and Daniel Antunes Pinheiro. Artwork and layout by #CBurius.
(In 200 Words, we highlight a new record we like a lot, via a 200-word review by Marc Masters and 200 words (or so) from the artist about whatever they choose.)
ROSS WALLACE CHAIT - Rocking & Rollin’ cassette (A Giant Fern)
I love music that makes songs sound abstract and makes abstraction sound like songs. Ross Wallace Chait has nailed that elusive middle ground on the ironically yet somehow logically-titled Rocking & Rollin’. It's not that every moment in these six tracks resides in that gray area - there are parts that are simply excellent abstract tone-poems, and there are other parts that are genuinely well-crafted songs. But the overall effect of Chait's ability to move between the poles of structure and freedom gives every track an amorphous feel in the best sense. You never really know if he’s going to dive one way or the other - or both at the same time.
In that sense Rocking & Rollin’ reminds me of a lot of high-quality rock/sound hybridizing. The way Chait drags his voice to rhyme with the music's droney loping particularly reminds me of Michael Morley's somnambulist marches during the Dead C's most drunken, hypnotic lurchings. But even though Chait is fully capable of massaging his concoctions into band-like shapes, Rocking & Rollin’ primarily has a one-man, hunched-over-in-my-basement feel that makes it connect on a single-brain-to-single-gut level. I can hear him making these songs as they’re happening, and I’m really glad he did.
– Marc Masters
ROSS WALLACE CHAIT on Rocking & Rollin’
After I finished my last solo tape Praise, a very thematic, ideas-turn-into-music-and-not-vice-versa sort of thing, I was struggling to come up with a concept that would as easily lead me to actually making sound. So I turned to old, unfinished pieces, field recordings, guitar parts and started thinking about if and how these things, some of them untouched for several years, could coalesce into one. This obviously isn’t a regular rock record; my idea rather was to imagine a band playing music in a way where an audience couldn’t tell whether they were master artists or first timers struggling to keep their instruments from working against them. That’s some of where my favorite music comes from. Elsewhere, Rocking and Rollin” becomes a more spiritual cruise. I wanted the drones and field recordings to flow in between the rock and roll so that you don’t notice where you are exactly until you’ve been there a while. For these bits I had some help. In a dream in 2014 I was abducted by aliens who, in a very Close Encounters manner, repeated a synth tune over and over from the ship while they beamed me up. It’s the only time I’ve ever remembered music I heard in a dream, so I wrote it down and eventually it ended up “Rocking and Rollin’” with all the rest of it.
Rocking & Rollin’ is out now on A Giant Fern. Buy it here.
Artwork in collaboration with Ricardo Martins for the split dSCI/Cangarra released by A Giant Fern. Limited to 150 copies, risograph printed cover with a saddle stitch booklet.
Artwork in collaboration with Ricardo Martins for the split dSCI/Cangarra released by A Giant Fern. Limited to 150 copies, risograph printed cover with a saddle stitch booklet.
