Vague Plot’s jams shimmer like highways melting in the heat, running straight on through Kansas or Nebraska until they disappear in the undecipherable distance. Which is to say, they go on for while, repeating the same short grooves ad infinitum, with modest changes, until the measures blow by like mile markers and the journey transcends itself.
“Moto” which opens, metes out the time in sharp, strummed intervals, a little syncopation marking irregular edges in the tick-tocky flow. And within that context, a sax can wail, a guitar can howl, a lick can bloom and fade and collapse in distortion. There’s order so that disorder can grow, a white picket fence around wild tangles of vegetation.
Vague Plot is made up of New York City avant-indie regulars, veterans of other bands, who got together to make driving, moving, long-form instrumental music a la Can and Popul Vuh during the pandemic. The one you’d probably pick out of a line-up first is Zachary Cale, here one of two guitarists, alongside Uriah Theriaultof Woodsy Pride. Phil Jacob of Psychic Lines plays the sax sometimes and a keyboard otherwise, while Ben Copperhead plays bass and John Studer drums.
The music grows contemplative in blues-tinged “Haunted Head” before spinning off into psychotropic grooves, like some weird mesh of Loren Connors and Om. It attains purity in the slow-evolving tones of closer “Windswept” which has a bit of Kluster in its crystalline lucidity.
You might think, with Cale involved, that there’s be a rustic rocker thread in Vague Plot’s aesthetic, a little Neil Young crashing through the motorisms. There mostly isn’t, sorry to disappoint, except oddly enough, on the tape’s best cut, “Cyclic.” Here Jacob’s sax wanders in and around a heavy groove that’s ever so slightly shaded with country rock tones. It’s a puzzle palace, a metronomic experiment in extended pulse, but with a ragged heart, and it’s the wildest and most excellent part of an excellent little album. Fuck the cowbell. Let’s have more guitar.
