Niblock Hooker Soldier First — Paiva River Songs (Gold Bolus)
This album might be haunted by waters; it certainly makes no pretense not to be. Paiva River Songs has its beginnings with a hydrophone submerged in Portugal’s Rio Paiva. Composer Phil Niblock’s interests long focused on droning microtonal work, aided by digital processing, so it feels a little surprising to picture him lost in nature, making underwater field recordings (even though his most urban work could still have a natural sensibility to it). Then an odd thing happens: the music sounds almost electronic. Surely context matters here; streams babble and talk. They sound like other things, but usually not electronic textures. The placement of the sounds on a Niblock record create the hearing, in one sense, but also simply point us to a more focused listening of a common sound.
That’s where the other three members of this quartet come in (“quartet” used oddly here, as Niblock passed away in 2024, after the project was initiated but the year before the studio part of this album was recorded). Dave Soldier (violin, banjo) and David First (guitar, harmonica) had worked with Niblock before, but not with each other. They’d both worked with drummer William Hooker, and so the degree of separation any of these pairings had been, closed down to a unit that turns out to be a tight fit.
The group resolved to play only straightforward acoustic music to go with the field recordings, as if they were all sitting at a river, calling it “Free-Improv Americana.” The sounds they find cross a broad spectrum. At times both Soldier and First sound more focused on their sorts of experimental art music than on the “Americana” part of the project. At other times the album opens up into traditional music: spirituals, camp songs, and the like. There’s little here that you would actually sing around the campfire, but the three musicians feint at it enough to make classic melody more tangible than might be expected.
Mostly, the musicians bring out the oddity of the whole experience. It’s an exercise in something more accessible than deep listening, but when First introduces a jews harp into section 5, it’s an unlikely twist that makes us question where we are — certainly not in Niblock’s laptop. Soldier follows with a banjo, and it’s a transformative moment, a transport 150 years back in time, but one in which the free-flowing river sounds like the least natural part of the recording. It’s the inverse of something the group did earlier, when they moved from First’s harmonica into more abstracted violin work, generating a gap between the old-timey setting and the assertive contemporary sensibility.
The ebb and flow creates a friction between the natural and the constructed, both in terms of creation and reception, which keeps the enterprise compelling. At points, as in the eight-minute mark, the album sounds almost ghostly, but whether it’s the past haunting the present or present apparitions invading the past remains unclear. The album ends with one of its most dissonant sections, only hinting at a return to traditional songcraft before eventually returning to water. Or at least we can only think it’s water, as it sounds more digital than before, maybe because its surrounded by analog effects that have conditioned us to consider everything carefully.
"It's got sad harmonica, incoherent mumbling, jazzy opera... bagpipes... rapper/opera singer who sounds like Mickey Mouse... harps... kidzzzzz bopzzzTM holiday infomercials... piccolos... brass section that sounds like farts... organs... all the stuff mid 90's Americans hated the most. Like a spiteful avenger, it was released into the wild to wreak havoc. Most tumblr users complained they couldn't listen to the full thing, but I despise The Most Wanted Song for being a generic ballad. The Most Unwanted Song is just a fun time all around"
'Cause I'm A Man (Tame Impala)
You wanna know why I always think I'm right?/Can never accept defeat and let it slide/I have no voice if I don't speak my mind/My weakness is the source of all my pride
AllMusic Staff Pick:
Komar & Melamid / David Soldier
The People's Choice Music: The Most Wanted Song, The Most Unwanted Song
The supposed result of a survey regarding the American population's musical likes and dislikes, The People's Choice Music is one of the avant-garde world's greatest pranks, particularly for the 22-minute post-modern opus "The Most Unwanted Song." An operatic cowgirl rapping about Wittgenstein! Kids screaming about where to do your holiday shopping over a drum machine-driven polka beat! Lots of bagpipes, tubas, accordions, and sporadic noise bursts! Adding to the absurdity, someone reissued this masterpiece on 8-track tape this year.
