Review: Golden Hum presents Chuck Johnson / Adam Stafford
@ Stirling Tolbooth, Saturday 27th October.
Regular alternative music showcase Golden Hum returned to the Stirling Tolbooth on Saturday 27th October, with another typically brilliant night of magically skewed music from the fringes of experimental folk, Americana, indie and ambient music. For the uninitiated, a Golden Hum night promises something cool, leftfield, unusual, unexpected and deep that will feed your head and your heart. Never mind if you’ve heard of the bands or not – if they’re playing Golden Hum, you know it’s gonna be memorable and special.
True to form, this edition paired Falkirk-based experimental musician Adam Stafford with American artist Chuck Johnson, and what a pairing they made.
Adam Stafford has been winning acclaim around the Scottish music scene for some years now, with this year’s Fire Behind the Curtain LP prompting rave reviews on release. Stafford draws from that record and earlier work tonight, building layers of electric guitar loops to create meditative, melodic explorations, at various points evoking Sonic Youth at their prettiest and most serene, or the fluid trilling of Nels Cline.
Fans of non-standard guitar sounds have plenty to feast their ears on as Stafford mixes strange oboe/flute sounds, ominous burrowing noises, percussive plinks and judiciously bent notes to glorious effect, building layers of loops to almost overload, before dropping back to the first pattern and building again. The fourth song, I’m You Last Week, sees a pretty arpeggio pattern overdubbed with a frankly staggering slide guitar part, as Stafford titivates the strings to produce a wave of heavenly orchestral sounds that swoop and glide and force your heart up into your mouth. The last track of the set pushes the envelope further still, as Stafford recreates the complex studio arrangement of The Witch Hunt by overlaying beatboxing, guitar harmonies, incantations and yelps, before layering his voice into a loop pedal choir. A glance around the room at this point reveals the crowd really digging this – eyes are closed, and heads are nodding.
If the support act’s job is to get people into the right frame of mind for the main act, then Stafford achieves this perfectly. Experimental American musician Chuck Johnson appears on stage a short time later, and treats us to a full set based around his recent conversion from conventional guitar to pedal steel, which resulted in the sublime 2017 LP Balsams.
Normally very much a backing instrument associated with country music, Johnson plugs his pedal steel into an arsenal of ambient effects pedals in order to elevate it not just to lead instrument status, but to a generator of a whole world of haunting and beautiful sound. He’s not in any particular rush to take us to that world mind you, with a gloriously languid opening spanning around ten minutes where unhurried tones, pulses and swells painstakingly slowly emerge and build into a wash of sound that provides the bedrock for the rest of the set. The glacial pace makes for a supremely chilled listening experience.
The music gradually emerges - slow, unhurried, totally serene, like a slow sunrise. It feels like watching a flower open in real time, in a good way. Like music to soundtrack the elements of the universe coalescing into matter. It transports you to imagined places – the bottom of the sea, the surface of the moon. If you can imagine Neil Young’s lapsteel player Ben Keith jamming with Brian Eno you’re somewhere close.
It’s not so much music but a formless force of sound – there are no breaks, just 45 minutes of uninterrupted drone. As such the spell it casts is never broken, and the audience, already highly suggestive after 30 minutes of Adam Stafford, are sent deep inside themselves. At at least one point, every single person in the room has their eyes shut. They are no longer here. I don’t know where they are, but they look pleased to be there. They look as if they are being healed in some small way the balm of this soothing noise.
Across the set melodies build and subside, until suddenly it comes to a close, and Chuck leaves the stage. Normally everyone would get up and go home, but nobody does. They sit around and only slowly and gradually drift out, as though their metabolisms have slowed to a Chuck Johnson tempo, and they need a few minutes to readjust. It certainly leaves a mark on everyone here.
And so closes another Golden Hum. There’s really nothing else quite like it anywhere near Stirling, and it seems to be building a crowd very much tuned into its unique aesthetic. If a taste of the cerebral and unexpected floats your boat, be sure not to miss the next one.
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