It’s been a year and a half since BASIC first emerged out of a bare bones set up of two guitars (Chris Forsyth and Nick Millevoi) and a drum machine. That early experiment, inspired by the 1984 collaboration between Robert Quine and Fred Maher, put a boxy, machine-drilled framework around open-ended guitar jam. Mikel Patrick Avery tended the rough propulsion of the drum machine, enriching its stutter with additional improvised percussion, while Forsyth and Millevoi slashed away at one another on conventional and baritone guitar. It was, at once, disciplined and free-spirited, and you can see why it appealed to Forsyth. Christian Carey reviewed the full-length debut last year, writing “With a rattling drum pattern, synth lines embellished by bent notes and wah-wah, and effects enriched guitars, ‘Versatile Switch’ combines kraut rock and funky fusion in equal measures.”
Now, Forsyth returns with a slightly reconfigured ensemble.He continues to coax the tone-shifting treble from a blues guitar, while Avery again complicates and bolsters programmed percussion. But instead of Millevoi, we now have Doug McCombs, playing a grounding, growly, slightly funkier bass in place of another guitar. The result is, if anything, trancier and more full of shimmer than the first album’s compositions, with undertones of Dollar Bill-like Afro-influence in its polyrhythmic textures.
“Tension Envelope” rides a bright, uncomplicated riff across 11 minutes of shifting terrain, the guitar sifting glitter over repeated bass/drum syncopations. The drum beat bloops and glitches, rigorously timed but tonally adventurous, as cymbals shiver and a bass drum beat rampages, each boom elongating like lava lamp blobs in motion. You might wonder why it goes on for so long, when the cut has stated its thesis within the first minute or two, but there’s something about reiteration that turns the straightforward into smoke and mirrors. The more you hear, the less certain you become about it. From machine-stamped precision, the cut opens up into mystery. The envelope can’t contain the tension forever.
“Changes, Changing” is only a bit shorter, its percussion enlivened by a skritchy cuica-like gulp and squeak. McCombs and Forsyth come at each other from opposite ends of each musical ideas, crossing somewhere in a contentious middle. And yet while they jut and stab and joust at one another, the music runs on unperturbed.Its spiky, insistent propulsion calms rather than agitates. The title track, though brief, is in some ways the most expansive, letting jet contrails of psychedelic guitar distortion drift and dissipate over ricky-ticky beats. Here Forsyth gets a scream out of his guitar that might put you in mind of Hendrix, if Hendrix ever did a stint with Suicide, that is.
The whole thing was recorded quickly and mostly live, and you can hear an animated process of listening, discovery and response developing among the three principals. It’s a demonstration of how a rigid understructure can support the wildest sort of experimentation. A hard beat anchors extravagant spirals of improvisatory excess, locks it down and keeps it honest.
Chris Forsyth - The Sultan Room, Brooklyn, New York, August 4, 2021
Once again, it's very nice to be linking over to NYC Taper in 2021. Lord only knows how long live music is going to last this year, so let's enjoy it while we can. And believe me, you will enjoy this rooftop recording of Chris Forsyth in Brooklyn from a few weeks back. Joined by a veritable supergroup of bassist Doug McCombs, drummer Ryan Jewell, and guitarist Tom Malach, Chris makes up for lost time with a barnstorming set of marvelous (and lengthy) excursions, kicking off with a rousing cover of Richard and Linda Thompson's "You're Going To Need Somebody." The new tunes debuted are predictably awesome, with the unshakeable Jewell driving his cohorts into orbit. Climb that Mystic Mountain, everyone!
Chris Forsyth — Plays Love Devotion Surrender (Bandcamp, 2024)
The golden anniversary of John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana’s 1973 record Love Surrender Devotion passed last year without much fanfare: no deluxe reissue or archival release from a short-lived supergroup of sorts. It instead remains one of the lesser explored chapters of McLaughlin’s long career.
Which isn’t to say it’s overlooked or under appreciated. The jam-heavy album of hard driving fusion has found fans over the decades, most notably guitar hero Chris Forsyth. At last fall’s Philly Music Fest, Forsyth headed a band that replayed the album in full for a packed crowd at Solar Myth. He was joined by guitarist Nick Millevoi, a rhythm section of Douglas McCombs, Mikel Patrick Avery and Ryan Jewell, plus Brent Cordero on electric organ. And not too long ago he made this set available for purchase on his Bandcamp.
Throughout Love Devotion Surrender, Forsyth and company don’t stray too far from the original. It’s the same material, roughly in the same order: the last two tracks are flipped, but it works to give this record a bombastic finale instead of the muted coda on the original.
It opens with John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and a burst of sound before the band settles into Coltrane's familiar intro. Forsyth’s guitar has a sharp tone that squeals and sounds like he’s pushing his amp to its limit. His playing is fluid and moves between longer notes and quick little flurries — a departure from McLaughlin’s machine gun-spray of notes on the original. Meanwhile Millevoi chugs along on rhythm guitar behind him with a choppy, wah-heavy tone. After a while they trade off and Millevoi steps up for a solo of his own, the two of them building up into a frenzy of dueling leads playing off each other. After about ten minutes the pace slows down a bit and they both settle into playing the iconic Coltrane riff. It’s an effective way to open the record, grabbing your attention and setting the mood of a night of guitar frenzy.
The band then moves into “Niama,” another Coltrane number. But this is the first step away from the record: where McLaughlin and Santana played this acoustically, with a bit of a Latin tinge, this band plays it a slow electric blues. The guitars draw the emotion out of this one as Cordero’s organ gives them a bed of sound to work on top of. It segues nicely into McLaughlin’s “A Love Divine” which builds up slowly from Cordero’s droning organ and bursts of percussion from Avery and Jewell. Both the guitarists slowly work their way into this one but before long they’re playing a flurry of notes as the rhythm section builds up the tension by playing the beat faster and faster. The whole band works itself up into a lather, finishing this one with blasts of cymbals and squealing guitars while McCombs keeps them on track with his bass.
Next comes the second wrinkle of the night: the band swaps the order of “Meditation” and “Let Us Now Enter the House of the Lord” while also changing the first to another slow electric blues from a sparse acoustic theme. With Cordero’s organ and McCombs bass holding the groove down, both Forsyth and Millevoi take their time to play around the chorus and trade off short solos. It’s actually one of the set’s more approachable moments and wouldn’t feel out of place on a Solar Motel record.
They finish the evening off with “Let Us Now…” which is a fitting bookend with “A Love Supreme.” They’re both lengthy performances where the guitars trade off riffs and are played something like spiritual jazz fusion opening with flurries of notes and drum rolls. It evolves into a vaguely Latin groove for the two guitars to solo over and eventually to jam in unison together.
The thing about a record like this is that for all the guitar heroics it doesn’t quite have the same spark as the original. There, both Santana and McLaughlin were going for a spiritual vibe, playing hard and fast like they were trying to lose themselves in the music and push into something spiritual. Indeed, bootlegs of this band on their short tour show them regularly pushing songs past the 20-minute mark. That was a group reaching for ecstasy.
By contrast, you never get the same feeling from Forsyth and company here. As good as their playing is, you know they’re playing tribute to a record instead of trying to catch the same religious feeling. It’s not really a bad thing, it just means they’re playing it a little safer and closer to the vest even when they work themselves up into a frenzy.
As far as tributes go, Plays Love Devotion Surrender doesn't mess with the gospel and anybody who loves guitar-heavy jamming will enjoy this. While it might not completely work for people unfamiliar with the original record or those without the patience to sit through long guitar workouts, fans with worn out copies of the original will have a lot here to chew on.
Michael A. Muller — Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
Ten independent artists — largely from the improvised, jazz-adjacent ambient side of things — venture into Michael A. Muller’s glowing, swirling soundscapes, each finding and bringing different textures there. Muller, a founder of the Texas minimalist music collective Balmorhea, sticks to long-toned, keyboard-based instruments: a Mellotron, an Oberheim Two-Voice Synthesizer and a Rhodes organ, creating luminous auras of tone. His collaborators play a variety of instruments — guitar, percussion, voice and cello — populating these edgeless, serene sonic spaces with melody and rhythm.
Muller himself plays the guitar, and he seems to have a particular affinity for its devotees. Bay Area finger-picker Danny Paul Grody scatters sparkly chords and meditative runs across synthesizer washes that surge and swell and ebb. Without the guitar, these tones might be too unreal, too grand, too beautiful to catch, but with these slow-blooming, organic figures, the music makes sense on a human scale. Chuck Johnson is a different case. His silvery sustained pedal steel music contains its own uncanny valleys, and so he slides like a ghost between shimmering, vibrating curtains, carving aching arcs of longing into a chilled, cerebral landscape. Douglas McCombs, of Tortoise, Brokeback and Black Duck, picks a clean, reverberating, almost surf-toned melody across an oscillating, shifting, reverential backdrop; he cuts right through it, emphatic and sure.
Women artists make a mark, though mostly with their voices. Vestals float eerie, altered sighs and caresses over the clear tones of Rhodes, a piercing descant one of this disc’s most gorgeous sounds. The Polish composer and pianist Hania Rani also sings, in a whisper amid shivering ambiences, in a way that reminds me a little of Mia Doi Todd. But Clarice Jensen, who sometimes plays with Balmorhea, brings her instrument along, threading rich throbs of cello through a landscape of widely spaced piano chords.
In the mirror game, budding actors stand face to face, copying each other’s expressions and gestures in real time, in a sort of synchronized dance. Here, the interaction is more oblique, with each artist staring into a foggy reflection and finding some element of themselves there. The music that arises is hardly synchronized, but the players find a way to react and build on what the other is doing. Oh, and it’s lovely. That’s important, too.
Chicago is the kind of town where it sometimes seems that everyone has played with everyone else, and indeed within and even across genres including jazz, post-rock, improvised music, folk, blues, electronics and even contemporary classical music, cross pollination proliferates. So it is not exactly surprising to see two Ryley Walker duet partners join forces with a Tortoise founder, who has himself, at times, played with both of them, and in more than one project. Black Duck might be an enduring musical undertaking or a one-off permutation of the Windy City’s considerable talent pool. Either way, it’s a winner.
To be specific, Black Duck is made up of Bill MacKay, Doug McCombs and Charles Rumback, all three of them artists whose work ranges across genres and puts them into contact with each other in a variety of contexts. Just for instance, when I went to see Meg Baird in Chicago last year, Doug McCombs was playing in her band as well as Chris Forsyth’s outfit, and Bill MacKay stood just off stage waiting to be called up by Forsyth. Rumback wasn’t there that night, but you get the idea. Bands are a fluid thing in Chicago.
MacKay’s main instrument is guitar—and his playing ranges from finger-picked folk to raging electric distortion to eerily beautiful slide. McCombs is best known for playing bass in Tortoise, for his multi-instrumental work in Brokeback and for turning up whenever musicians need help finding a groove. Rumback is a drummer with a background in jazz and a strong melodic sense; in his duets with Ryley Walker, he served as an equal partner, driving the song forward as much as the guitarist. In Black Duck, they draw on many different aspects of their respective, eclectic backgrounds, flitting freely from sun-drenched cosmic country, to driving kraut rock, to radiant, enveloping ambiences, all played so expertly that it seems effortless, though it probably isn’t.
Consider, for instance, “Of the Lit Back Yards, the trippy country daydream that kicks off the album, brushes shuffling, bass grumbling, guitar dripping unhurried sweetness. If a roadhouse bar band died and went to heaven, it might sound a lot like this. It has almost nothing in common with the driving blues vamp that powers “Delivery,” bass line licking flames around a motorik beat, and yet the two sit comfortably one track away from one other in the sequencing. What’s between them is even more incongruous, the shivering atmospheres and rolling thunder of “Foothill Daze” (oh, hey, there’s that unearthly slide I was talking about). And yet different as these tracks are, they fit together in a strange surreal way, like the soundtrack to a movie you don’t quite understand, and they are undeniably beautiful.
To my ears, “Lemon Treasure,” near the end, does the best job at bringing all these different elements together. It pulses like a locomotive. It dreams like a lotus eater. It lets notes of soap bubble delicacy bloom alongside rough-riding rhythms. It’s an irresistible groove and an opium vision, and when you think about it, who else could have made this track? These three guys, that’s who. Long live Black Duck.
“Dreaming In The Non-Dream” - Chris Forsyth with Garcia Peoples
Incoming! Chris Forsyth has a killer live LP on the way, capturing a double-drum/triple guitar blowout in Philadelphia last year -- check out a pro-shot video excerpt (a long excerpt) of the gig above. Available to preorder now and Chris will be selling it at the merch stand on his tour with White Denim which kicks off in late March. Amazingly, that tour starts in Denver, of all places, so I’ll finally get to see Forsyth in person, after all these years. Should be great. His band this time around features the great Ryan Jewell on drums and the legendary Doug McCombs (Tortoise, Brokeback, etc) on bass. Check out the dates and go go go!
By the way, the “Dreaming In The Non-Dream” video was filmed by Jesse Sheppard, one-half of Elkhorn. I just reviewed their latest LP, The Storm Sessions, and the band also just unleashed a very very nice Lagniappe Session, too. Praise ye the lord!
Basic - Seuffert Bandshell, Queens, New York, September 14, 2024
Just a couple months back, but a lifetime ago – BASIC in Queens! These bandshell shows organized the mighty Oneida always look so fun. But for those of us not out on the east coast, the terrific EricPH / NYC Taper recording will suffice.
Basic, in case you missed it, released their debut LP recently; it's a killer collection of lean/mean grooves, Chris Forsyth's ever-adventurous guitar work slicing and dicing atop Nick Millevoi's baritone guitar and Mikel Patrick Avery's propulsive percussion and electronics.
Millevoi, however, isn't touring with Basic, and the great Doug McCombs (Tortoise, Brokeback, Eleventh Dream Day, Black Duck, etc) is filling his shoes, bringing his own distinctive flavor to the proceedings. The trio is hitting the road in the upcoming weeks — if this tape is any indication, you've gotta go see them.
25 years of listening to this record and pining for that sound. I have curbed my Gear Acquisition Syndrome quite a bit. For example, I traded three other instruments for this. But it's exciting to go on a whole new journey with my hands and ears and my soul. I'm working on new music with two old friends over the Internet and it just screams for this and I did it.
