Jeff Burch is the Ontario NDP’s candidate for the riding of Niagara Centre. He is the Executive Director of Niagara Folk Arts, a non–profit social services agency. He spent 15 years working as an organizer, local president and contract negotiator for healthcare and longterm care workers. He also served two terms as a city councillor for Merritton.
Carve out a bit of time for this one, because there’s no use in rushing through Jeff Burch’s guitar and modular synth reveries. Notes hang over multiple measures, guitar chords chime in widely-spaced intervals, slow-blooming buzzes blossom and recede. Think plate tectonics, evolution, glacial drift — these two tracks move with that kind of inevitability, and you only notice changes when they’ve been in progress for a while.
Burch’s solo work is much different. Abstract and lovely, it builds keening, violin-like drones out of bowed and prepared guitars and laces limpid pools of overtone with glowing synth notes. The first track, “Nine Points,” borrows Sydney composer Marcus Whale for a bit of saxophone, the horn, like the guitar and synths, intent on long, unchanging notes that bend and flicker at the edges but do not pursue any linear forward movement. A few minutes in, a scrim of guitar feedback introduces friction-y, post-punk warmth and excitement; it’s not so different from certain drawn out Sonic Youth instrumentals.
“La Perouse” is denser, right from the beginning, with multiple guitar jangles overlapping in sunny kaleidoscope patterns, a bit like Ecstatic Sunshine or Bright. There’s some drumming on this one — that’s Stephen James from Burch’s old band Songs — and also extra guitar, down to Tres Warren of Psychic Ills. The track, which is likely named after a beach-y Sydney suburb, ups the noise quotient, fluttering squiggles and blurts of altered guitar through its precision and launching bee swarms of feedback that zoom in and out of the sound. There’s a nice sense of communication in this second half. The main guitar line poses an idea in its upward swooping lick, and it is answered by a satisfying thud-thud of drums.
Still even the more eventful “La Perouse” evolves slowly, moving in a leisurely way towards an end that might be a conclusion or might just be a slow fade out. This is an album that keeps its own time and makes its own space, but serenity can be had if you match your clock to its.