Boxhead Ensemble — Here: Chicago Sessions (Hired Hand)
Photo by Thomas Bernhard
Movies may play on your emotions, but film production is no place for the sentimental. No matter how good an individual shot or sound may be, if it doesn’t serve the film’s purpose it should not be there. A skilled gleaner can sweep lots of glorious stuff off the cutting room floor, sometimes bonus scenes for the DVD, and in the case under consideration here a complete double LP by Boxhead Ensemble.
Boxhead Ensemble founder/leader Michael Krassner and filmmaker Braden King have sustained a partnership since the 1990s that has included live accompaniment for selected shorts and multiple soundtracks for the movie Dutch Harbor: Where The Sea Breaks It’s Back. Krassner’s approach to scoring capitalizes on the improvisational skills of musicians selected for their identifiable sounds and the potential chemistry of personnel combinations that may occur for the first time when the players plug in, sit down and start playing along with what’s on the screen. For Dutch Harbor, he assembled a line-up of mid-1990s Chicago rock and post-rock all-stars. When the movie hit the road, he took some of those musicians and a shifting array of new ones to make a new score every night. Not long after a Boxhead tour of Europe in the wake of the September 11th attacks, Krassner moved to Arizona, but he’s sustained ties to both Chicago and King. In the early 2000s, the Ensemble made a series of stand-alone records that blurred the lines between ambient and Americana.
Most recently Krassner worked with King on Here, a road movie about a cartographer’s misadventures in Armenia. Between 2008 and 2011 they staged multi-media experiences that combined three screens showing footage shot for Here, holograms, and a live band. He also scored the finished movie, which circulated festivals in 2011. Not long before the movie was complete, Krassner came back to Chicago to try to channel a bit of that Dutch Harbor energy. He booked a couple days at Electrical Audio and convened a small group of players who have been associated with different phases of the Boxhead Ensemble. Jim White, who drums with the Dirty Three, was a mainstay of the late 1990s-early 2000s touring ensembles. Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm returned from the non-filmic records made later in the 2000s. Guitarist Tim Rutili and fiddle/guitar player James Becker have not only come in and out of Boxhead since the late ‘90s, but have also retained Krassner as a producer for Califone’s Heron King Blues. More recent recruit Shahzad Ismaily is a multi-instrumentalist whose credits run the gamut from Laurie Anderson to the Renderers. Nothing from the session made it into the movie, but a double album sourced from the Electrical Audio sessions has been released just in time for the 20th anniversary of Dutch Harbor’s first screenings.
The MO for these sessions involved different combinations of musicians playing in response to scenes from the movie. As befits a film set mainly in mountain passes, near-desert expanses and crumbling buildings far older than the people who currently inhabit them, the music evinces grit and a potentially endless vibe that sustains even after the music fades to silence. Resonant cello, liquid bass and slowly feeding-back electric guitar negotiate a contrapuntal reverie on “Wednesday Trio No. 4;” a similarly named but differently configured trio recorded the next day uses heavily strummed guitar and pizzicato fiddle to evoke slow, trudging progress. Becker’s acoustic bowing bring to mind pre-electrification antiquity, while liberally pedal-processed electric guitars played by most parties acknowledge the plot point that Here’s protagonist is doing advance work for an eventual Google Maps-type documentation of Armenia. Rutili’s distinctive, chugging contributions recall his playing in Califone. They confer a temporally unmoored, Neil Young on the moon quality to certain tracks. As is his wont, Krassner plays frequently but understatedly, adding solidifying loops and linchpin flourishes that pull everything together.
One wonders why this music didn’t make it to the finished film. Not the hints of Americana; the finished film still has a bit of that. It has a strong identity — if you’ve heard the Dutch Harbor soundtrack and the mid-2000s records, you’ll likely recognize the links between this music and that in short order. Most likely King already had enough good sound material and just put this stuff in the bank as insurance. It’s certainly strong enough to exist on its own.
Here’s part two of our monthly run-down of short reviews. Contributors (across both parts) include Bryon Hayes, Jennifer Kelly, Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer and Jonathan Shaw.
Michael Krassner & John Dieterich — bullish(ish) (Moone)
Neither Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, many production gigs) nor John Dietrich (Deerhoof, duos with Mary Halvorson and Tashi Dorji) are strangers to the idea of sitting down with another guitarist and seeing what comes out. This record isn’t exactly an improvised encounter — that was their first gig, and bullish(ish) is the result of recordings that were made shortly after — but there’s still an air of “let’s see what happens” about it. Side one (both sides spin at 45, making this a short LP or bus-commute-friendly digital listen) is a sequence of fragments, some unemphatically wiggy, some lurching in a clankety-rocking way. Side two drifts into a shiny atmosphere that flickers and evaporates around the Laraine Kaizer-Viazovtsev’s pensive violin. Some records try; this one just is.
Bill Meyer
Magda Mayas’ Filamental — Murmur (Relative Pitch)
In other settings, Magda Mayas’ handiness with keyboard preparation opens up extraordinary realms of sound. But her own playing is submerged into the discourse of a string-heavy octet in Filamental, which has become the Berlin-based improviser’s vehicle to explore group behavior. One feels more than hears her prepared piano tolling within a moving mass of strings and reeds on Murmur. The musicians seek to emulate the combination of spontaneous reconfiguration and precision maneuvering achieved by flocks of birds, attaining achieve cohesion through pitch selection as each instrument contributes sounds near to the rest. But as the sounds gather, some player will assert a contrary notion, which may cause the rest to pivot or simply absorb the dissenting gesture. This is the group’s third recording, and while the organizing principal has been different each time, their common preference for apposite understatement makes this recording one that rewards recurring scrutiny.
Bill Meyer
Dustin O’Halloran — Lumiere (Splinter)
Lush bolts of silky strings unfurl in slow melodic patterns. Piano chords strike thoughtful, melancholic poses. Poised somewhere between ambient music, soundtrack and new classical, Lumiere was the fourth album for film composer and A Winged Victory for the Sullen artist Dustin O’Halloran. The album debuted in 2011, and all of the original tracks remain. To this, however, O’Halloran has added four more cuts, all recorded around the same time as the original material. These new tracks hold up very well against the ones from before. “Fragile N. 1” infuses the soft crescendo of piano and drums with altered angelic voices, a larger palette companion for the piano-led, string-throbbing “Fragile N. 4” from the earlier disc. A Robert Lippok remix of “We Move Lightly” interjects a playful percussion cadence into O’Halloran’s slow-blooming atmospherics. Lumiere is lovely but a little repetitive; play it when you want to wind down.
Jennifer Kelly
Ben Richter — Mymerian (Sedimental)
Label name and artistic concept converge on this set of slow-motion, long-tone music, which was recorded on a cold evening using the 120-year-old pipe organ at Epsilon Spires in Brattleboro, Vermont. Temperature matters, because it dropped the instrument’s tuning, adding a degree of low-frequency disorientation to the three pieces played by organist-accordionist-composer Ben Richter. The music is layered, and each layer is coded with both personal and geological time stamps, but you don’t need to know anything about them to appreciate this music’s looming murk. The ways its monochrome façade fronts endless depth makes it an ideal surface on which to project your own! For example, the way that bassist Mike Bullock and cellist Laura Cetilia’s lines arc and wind through Richter’s thick keyboard sonorities on the title track evokes a view of pterodactyls gliding through the black clouds belching forth from a volcano.
Bill Meyer
The Sleeves – The Sleeves (12XU)
Jack Cooper purposely streamlined Modern Nature into a tight quartet for their most recent album The Heat Warps; he goes even sparser on this new collaboration with guitarist Tara Cunningham. These are intensely intimate songs that the pair formed through joint improvisation on electric guitar. The clean, ringing tones are entwined, as are the pair’s hushed vocals. Aside from occasional whistling and vocal overdubs, The Sleevesrelies entirely on raw guitar interplay and delicate vocal melodies. This lean and gentle approach really emphasizes Cooper and Cunningham’s probing guitar work, encouraging deep listening and introspection. Their sound functions perfectly as a minimalist foil to the groove-based tunes of Modern Nature, using sound and silence in equal measure.
Bryon Hayes
St. Silva — Forager (AKP)
St. Silva’s Ben Dexter Cooley made these luminous ambient compositions partly in his studio, but also partly in the verdant swamps and meadows and mountain paths of upper Vermont. It’s a mix of electronic futurism and primordial nature, shot through with bird song and vibrating with synthesized calm. You can move through these tracks as if through sun-dappled forests, pushing back the undergrowth to catch a glimpse of red-bellied robin, pausing in cooler shade to appreciate a sunny clearing opening out of old growth trees. Cooley lists no fewer than 11 bird species represented in Forager, but he is by no means a nature documentarian. He views these sounds as raw materials, an element in pieces that defy easy classification. Pulsing Germanic synths percolate the buzz of “Sun Flies,” while haunting long tones hover in droning “Little Acorn.” Imagine Roedelius sauntering though the sudden warmth of Vermont spring or Tangerine Dream admiring local flora and fauna from their gleaming spaceship. Wholly natural—and beautiful for it—but also fit together with art and care.
Jennifer Kelly
Whitelands — Sunlight Echoes (Sonic Cathedral)
Whatever the reasons, it’s a real shame that Whitelands have split. After an excellent 2024 debut (Dusted review here) and opening for Slowdive on tour momentum seemed to be building, but whether it’s the brutal financial realities of being a band in 2026 or any other of the innumerable reasons bands stop working, the release of Sunlight Echoes earlier this year showed no signs of a sophomore slump. Maybe a little tougher and scrappier than Night-bound Eyes Are Blind to the Day (even as standout tracks “Songbird (Forever)” and “I Am No God, an Effigy” brought in Iskra Strings to sweeten the mix), if anything their songwriting and playing suggested they were about to go to another level even as Sunlight Echoesitself is once again one of the best shoegaze records of the year. For most of us, these two short LPs (each clocking in at just over 33 minutes) are all we have to remember Whitelands by, but they will be remembered.
Ian Mathers
You-On — New Side (12XU)
New Side is the result of three improvisational sessions between pianist Masami Tomihisa and drummer Jim White. On these recordings, the pair play with sound, acknowledging this with the name they chose for this project, You-On. They shift between moods, carrying a sprightly bounce at times, turning introspective at others, and bringing the thunder when the situation calls for it. Synchrony reigns, belying the fact that this is the pair’s first recording together. The mind meld is palpable, and while the piano-drums combo is a rarity, New Side will have listeners chasing down more.
Fred Lonberg-Holm, 'Site Specific: Duets for Cello and Guitar' CD (Explain)
Tuesday, May 25, 2021, 11:12am (full listen, very partially in background)
Listened to this one once more before filing away, and got a much better sense of the proceedings this time. Noticed a little more than last time that some of the not-so-usual suspects on guitar were more obviously working in more abstracted areas of the instrument, working with extended techniques, bowing, etc, which I can relate to very much as a sometimes violin-wielding percussionist. A great release, with a great screen printed cover and a very unusual package design with a hard-to-open tucked flap; will likely return to it in the future.
Fred Lonberg-Holm, 'Site Specific: Duets for Cello and Guitar' CD (Explain)
Sunday, May 16, 2021 (various portions heard throughout the day)
Finally getting around to checking out this disc I scored from an old friend too many years ago during one of the many CD collection purges I've been privvy to. This disc has a neat conceit: each piece is a duo with FLH (cellist) recorded on successive days at the homes of each participating guitarist, some of whom are well known as guitarists (Jim O'Rourke, Michael Krassner) and others not so much (Jeb Bishop, Michael Zerang). The results are all awesome, with a high degree of variety, although I didn't quite follow along with "who's on this track" except for a few occasions - I will listen more closely again soon and do this.
Boxhead Ensemble - “Homage to the Tren Brothers (for Mick and Jim)”
Didn’t even know that Boxhead Ensemble’s “Electric Guitar” album existed. Distilled down to embryonic instrumentalist Michael Krassner, the tracks are “late night... first idea, best idea” guitar sketches of many of BE’s wonderful songs.
Check the whole playlist, it’s sublime for these strange and delicate times.
