Each of the four pieces on BCMC’s Foreign Smokes, a full-length collaboration between the guitarist Bill Mackay and the multi-instrumentalist Cooper Crain, begins somewhere small — a few investigatory notes from Mackay’s guitar, a warm drone from Crain’s keys. Ideas are trotted out, the pace and intensity accelerating when both players latch onto something. There is little in the way of pyrotechnics, though the music never stands still or bogs down. This is improvisation as exploration and exchange; one player cuts a trail in a few directions, giving his counterpart options; gesturing with a question, rather than dictating anything.
At the outset of the third track, “Ripple in High Tide,” Mackay bends a few short notes, while Crain sets twinkling touches around the margins. They go on like this until a prodding two-note bass pattern rises up and marches forward. It is a steadying presence, a clockwork plunk of pebbles producing the titular wavelet. Mackay’s picking remains relatively plain, allowing Crain an opening to send shafts of glimmering synth down over the proceedings. Crain’s part established, Mackay takes another step, playing each note just a bit harder, sending the echo farther out. Halfway through, Mackay locks into step over the bassline, walking his guitar into compact bursts as synths sway and sparkle and the organ drone applies greater and greater pressure. This model for playing off of each other — a sonic wall built one intriguing stone at a time — allows either one of Crain or Mackay to incite the action without overshadowing what they’re creating together.
A pearly organ riff emerges from the opening ease of the last song, “Sunset Saturn.” After a few bars, Mackay joins in, sending picked guitar notes tailing out into the reddening sky. The pair trade the spotlight over a persistent drone until they’re deep in conversation; Mackay’s guitar is vivid and peaceful, strumming over a meandering organ which builds to a pleasant bluster, Crain letting loose like a cosmic prog-rocker. Throughout Foreign Smokes, Crain plays with great vitality and without ostentacion, allowing his parts to grow organically from the scene he and Mackay are forming, with the tangible excitement of ad hoc realization. Like his work in Bitchin Bajas, the space illuminated by his music is liable to shift; the ground you’re standing on is still solid, but look up and your surroundings have swirled and warped. What begins in tranquility can quickly turn sordid and eerie, dropping you somewhere more brambled and complex by the end. Sometimes, however, there’s unease from the start. Track two, “The Swarm,” is underlaid by drawn out minor synth chords, which are soon joined by tense squiggles of guitar. Fuller, ostensibly more charismatic guitar and organ parts strive to break through over the top, but the song’s anxious feel breeds on these shifting keys and billowing textures; the bright and the palpable unsettled by hoots from a threatening forest.
The sound of Foreign Smokes is deceptively straightforward considering the rich ambience and evocative moods the pair achieve. While it rewards multiple listens with novel wrinkles – cymbals that settle into the mist, a flinty synth stab that might’ve been shorn from a Depeche Mode chorus – and is fleshed out and dramatized with a supporting array of synthesizers, the album’s greatest bounty is gathered from the immediate and simple interplay between Mackay’s lightly affected guitar and Crain’s similarly stripped down organ. The first time through, you hear Foreign Smokes in the familiar voices of those instruments, piped and plucked from around the corner, music filling a room you’re not sure you’ve reached until you’re at the center of it.
