Chris Forsyth — Solar Motel (Expanded) (Algorithm Free)
Chris Forsyth marks the ten-year anniversary of his turn from towards rock with this expanded edition of Solar Motel, augmented with two previously unreleased studio tracks and a side-long live WFMU recording of “Paranoid Cat.” The two newly released tracks are a revelation, solidifying and reaffirming Forsyth’s connection to Television (he studied with Richard Lloyd) with cartwheeling guitar riffs and roiling, surging percussion in the epic vein of Marquee Moon.
Forsyth was just off his 2011 release of Paranoid Cat when he made Solar Motel, stillstruggling for a way to incorporate a palette of influences—Television, Takoma-style fingerpicking, psych and drone—into a coherent aesthetic. Our own Bill Meyer saw him as only partly successful at this on the previous album, calling Paranoid Cat, “an album that is full of good ideas lifted from other people’s work, but he makes such good use of them that it’s easy not to care.”
Solar Motel, Forsyth’s first full-band album, was a big step towards the driving, boogie-ing, rock-leaning long grooves that we have since come to associate with the guitarist. In the notes, he says, “Solar Motel is the first record on which I overtly took rock tropes and twisted them into new shapes, incorporating so many of my interests and influences - the twin-guitar elegance of Television, the sprawl of West Coast psych, the boiled down Rock Minimalism of Rhys Chatham, the abstract tangles of free improv, an undercurrent of ecstatic jazz energy, and the studio textures of Eno/Cale/Roxy ‘70s art rock.… Solar Motel basically set the template for much of what I did for the remainder of that decade.”
The band for Solar Motel included Forsyth, drummer Mike Pride, bassist Peter Kerlin and keyboard player Shawn Edward Hansen, all musicians that Forsyth had worked with previously in various roles and configurations. It was recorded mostly live, though Forsyth put in additional guitar after the fact to build up Television-like layers of interplay. The music took shape in four numbered tracks Solar Motel I through IV. “Part I” opens with tense, staccato guitar, at first alone, then joined by a second guitar and bass. The groove is insistent, cleanly minimal, and over it, Forsyth improvises warm, fluid arcs of solo guitar, and as it goes, the texture becomes less of a drone and more of a warm, living jam. This becomes a pattern over the next three track, as taut, disciplined motifs blossom into full-band free play. Repetition becomes a launching pad for the wildest swirls of improvisatory ornament, with sweet lyrical mid-range guitar vaulting over motorik grooves.
All that is still there, still striking in the way it marries austere experiment to lighter flaring guitar solo. If you haven’t heard it—or haven’t heard it in a while—all four original tracks remain very much worth a listen. However, it’s the new stuff that you’ll want to spin right away, because these two unreleased tracks take the basic experiment and launch them into richer, more exciting directions.
“Harmonious Dance,” at just under nine minutes, is the expanded release’s best tune. A slow chime of guitar notes hitting turbulence early on in Pride’s swelling drum roll. The notes get bigger, more resonant, more sustained as they go, taking on the burnished glow of Lloyd and Verlaine in tandem (though without the trebly yelp of vocals). “Long Warm Afternoon” starts out with warmth and sustained tones, building shimmering textures of guitar over a steady thump and roll. Both cuts feel less restrained, less tightly disciplined than the original Solar Motel cuts. It’s as if Forsyth had a concept for setting down guardrails and eventually swamping them with sensory data, and it took him a while to implement it fully.
The WFMU recording is fine, too, letting the twitchy glamor of “Paranoid Cat” stretch out, catch fire in a truly insane instrumental freakout and somehow stuff all that back into the bottle for a reprise of the original melody. But if you need a reason to check out this ten years after reissue, I’d look at the two unreleased tracks, where Forsyth and his band hit a groove they’ve been riding ever since.
Bassist Peter Kerlin has been a key part of some killer records over the past decade, with Chris Forsyth’s Solar Motel Band and Sunwatchers (he’s a heliocentric guy), not to mention his recommended Peter Kerlin Octet record from 2013. This latest solo release sees him playing the eight-string bass in a variety of settings. Glaring Omission kicks off with an awesome jam featuring fellow Solar Motel denizen Ryan Jewell that calls to mind Future Days-era Can, Peter locking in with the drummer over a burbling wash of violin and keys. Beautiful. Another highlight is the solo “Remember This One, Maat?” — a lovely, meditative example of Kerlin’s exceptional musicianship and imagination. Get Glaring!
Brent Cordero & Peter Kerlin — A Sublime Madness (Astral Spirits)
A Sublime Madness by Brent Cordero & Peter Kerlin
The partnership of Brent Cordero and Peter Kerlin precedes the pandemic, but the 2020 shutdown set the stage for them to make something lasting out of it. At any rate, it cleared their schedules. Furthermore, the tenor of the times created a milieu that the album acknowledges and responds to.
Cordero, who has played keyboards for Psychic Ills and Mike Wexler, provides organ, piano and synthesizer. Kerlin, of Sunwatchers and the Solar Motel Band, plays upright and electric basses. They first recorded as an improvising duo on Kerlin’s album Glaring Omission, which documents his efforts to come to terms with the eight-string bass. But, with time on their hands and the state of the nation on their minds, they set about organizing their music into a cohesive statement. While improvisation still figures in their methods and sonic orientation, the album was assembled in stages, with guest players adding drums, horns, viola and synthesizer to the duo’s original recordings. In essence, the solos function to provide focus and emotional impact to music that takes note of examples that are jazz-adjacent, but not jazz-confined.
“Movement To Protect The People” opens with a churchy organ melody. It sets the stage for an intricate countermelody articulated by an upright bass, which is then overtaken by spare piano notes, which drift in time with Ryan Sawyer’s stately, swinging backbeat. With each change, I found myself waiting for a voice that never arrives — Robert Wyatt’s. The tunes, textures and vibe all sound deeply inspired by his work, and the title suggests that their hearts beat in time with that of music’s most compassionate communist. However, the title of the propulsive waltz that follows, “Decolonize This Place,” articulates a consciousness that is very tuned into the trials of the present; Kerlin and Cordero aren’t just playing out their Soft Machine dreams. And the music is equally tuned into newer information. The effects on Cordero’s organ during the first solo show an engagement with malleable, distorted sound shaped more by pedal-hopping guitarists than post-bebop keyboardists. And a rippling performance by tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis adds to Kerlin and Cordero’s virtual community.
Over the next five tracks a steady stream of musicians, including Jessica Pavone, Ryan Jewell and Daniel Carter, add their distinguishing voices to music that sounds like it is trying to transcend the realities alluded to by titles such as “White Supremacy In Black Face” and “Affordable For Who?” You can’t change the facts on the ground by slapping stirring names on instrumental compositions. But in a time when the American political discourse has morphed into a naked donnybrook over the means by which dissenting voices will be told how to shut up, it feels as necessary to say where one stands as it does to give comfort to those who are standing up.
Animal, Surrender! is a duo made up of Sunwatchers’ Peter Kerlin on bass and Rob Smith on drums. On their first, self-titled album, the pair execute, loping, elastic grooves, nodding towards folk and blues but never quite settling into genre. In her review, Jennifer Kelly called the song, “Led by the Bit,” “an intriguing rattletrap construction, bounded by intricate, syncopated percussion but with Kerlin’s bass musing its bass-like dreams within these constraints.” Here’s what Kerlin and Smith are listening to.
Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy — “White Nile”
PETE: I first started to slip into the Animal, Surrender! sound world upon hearing African Skies, by Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy at Domino Sound in New Orleans in 2011. I asked the purveyor, “What is this and please tell me it’s for sale.” It’s been in regular rotation since. Pure magic, flawless without being precious for a single moment.
Jeff Parker — “2019-07-08-ii”
ROB: The drummer here, Jay Bellerose is my favorite currently-working drummer... all space, tone, and touch. Earthy patterns intersect and breathe in ways that simultaneously nurture and tug at the other voices in the ensemble. Although I absolutely love what he does with groups as dad-rockish as Alison Krauss & Robert Plant, this heady double-LP from Eremite really gives us a clear open view of his masterful creativity with timbre and air.
Ann O Aro — “Zardin”
PETE: The economy of the arrangements on this record and the spare, precise production were a touchstone in the recording stage of A,S!. There is some crazy stuff going on here though. O Aro’s voice is clearly a thing of beauty but that is 100% not the point at all. The music has an undeniable force and is bound together with an incredible tension. An example of the Maloya anti-colonial music from the Island of Reunion where she hails and a deeply personal dredging and catharsis synthesized seamlessly. Shout out to Mike Bones for turning me on to it.
Gunter Schickert — “Puls”
ROB: Klaus Schulze’s roadie didn’t use any synthesizers or sequencers to craft his own singular, prowling Berlin hypnosis. The warp and weft of multitrack tapes, guitars, and drums is exactly the kind of mind-fabric that prepared me for working within Animal, Surrender!
Jack Rose & The Black Twig Pickers — “Kensington Blues”
PETE: Rose loomed large for me. This track played on repeat in my mind for years. It’s so effortless, it’s as if the music existed already, unheard, and the band is just revealing it. My effort to balance multiple voices on the bass comes out of a fascination with this “American Primitive” sound. Nathan Bowles is here on percussion. Bowles shared the drum chair with Rob in Pigeons!
Hopkinson Smith — “Robert de Visée: Pieces de Theorbe”
LES SYLVAINS DE Mr. COUPERIN par Mr. de Visée
ROB: One of the greatest musical conversations I ever had was speaking intimately with the genius lutenist Hopkinson Smith over pints of stout about unmeasured preludes and the intersections of baroque string music and bluegrass. This incredible 1979 recording of works for theorbo, an epic bass lute, shows how a multi-course bass instrument originally designed for accompaniment can take the spotlight, much as Peter’s 8-string bass does within this group.
Jessica Pavone — “Dawn to Dark”
PETE: I was split about which Pavone track to include here. Her recent “less tempered” works are riveting, but I chose this early Pavone chamber piece featuring my old bandmate, Emily Manzo, a pianist of extraordinary ability, who is also a gifted songwriter and singer. Here Pavone casts her as a vocalist. There’s musicality and presence in every nanosecond of her performance. Stunning yet never bombastic. The pacing and restraint that Jessica brings to the whole record leads you deep into some psychic space, you forget you’re listening to “chamber music.”
Henry Cow — “Nirvana for Mice”
ROB: Chris Cutler’s way of feeling deep grooves inside of twisted, asymmetrical compositions always sounds brand new and shocking to my ears despite this album’s 1973 session date. He’ll crack a nasty backbeat inside a careful avant woodwind arrangement, forcing your ass to swivel despite your brain being patiently sliced open on the band’s dissection table. Dada blues for sure.
75 Dollar Bill — “Beni Said”
PETE: One of the most consistently inspiring live bands in New York for the past decade. It was while lost in one of Che’s asymmetrical Mauritanian riffs on his modified Hagstrom 12-string that I had an “ah ha!” moment about the 8-string bass and how to bring it into the foreground. We’ve had an ongoing dialogue about it that has kept me going in those moments when I’m questioning this weird obsession I have with this uncooperative instrument.
Bullwackies All Stars — “Kicking Scott, Rockfort Dub”
ROB: Lloyd Barnes’ Bronx dub devastation provided an early shared navigational system for us in Animal, Surrender! Wackie spirals you down infinite, dissociative avenues of echo paved with the deepest bass around. Melodic organisms bloom from the cracks and illuminate pathways through the twisted urban ecology, clouds of pungent smoke notwithstanding.
Psychic Ills keyboardist, Brent Cordero and Sunwatchers bassist, Peter Kerlin’s, first full length collab A SUBLIME MADNESS is the culmination of decades of circling each other's creative orbits. After years of casual jamming, numerous fledgling one offs, and touring sideman gigs (ibrighden addition to Sunwatchers, Kerlin was also Chris Forsyth’s long time bass player and in the John Dwyer helmed improv project, Bent Arcana. Cordero worked for years with Psychic Ills and Mike Wexler among others). Here, the two sidemen synchronize orbits and create a sound with keys and bass as a molten center.
But A SUBLIME MADNESS is not a strict duo album or a COVID bedroom record, by any stretch. Drummer, Ryan Sawyer provides torrents of percussion and each tune is built out as the two invite in a crew of past collaborators, legends, luminaries, cohorts and stalwarts: Daniel Carter (woodwinds), James Brandon Lewis (tenor sax), Jessica Pavone (viola), Ryan Jewell (percussion), Charles Burst (percussion), Adam Amram (congas), Aaron Siegel (vibraphone), Jesse DeRosa (modular synth) - each person contributing their musical voice throughout. The result is an expansive sound and vision. A conjuring of spontaneous, collective spirit in which each player’s contribution is highlighted and distilled in conversation with each other over the arc of the record.
Titles of several pieces are a tribute to NYC based Black radical activist groups, Movement To Protect The People and Decolonize This Place, that organize against gentrification and economic inequality as well as for the interconnected struggle for Indigenous, Black, and Palestinian liberation. This activism has been met with state violence along with media dismissal and condescension. The first song, “Movement to Protect the People”, is a dedication to Brent’s partner, LaShaun Ellis, a member of a Black women-led group of that name, who has successfully fought corrupt developers and politicians attempting to build in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The song titles “Affordable for Who?” and “White Supremacy in Black Face”, frame the instrumental music in a context of on-the-ground struggle against gentrification, displacement, and other racist policies.
Brent Cordero: Combo Organ, Piano, Synths
Peter Kerlin: Electric Bass, Upright Bass, 8 String Bass
Ryan Sawyer: Drums (except Track 3)
Featuring:
Daniel Carter: Alto Saxophone / Flute (Track 4 & 6)
James Brandon Lewis: Tenor Saxophone (Track 2)
Jessica Pavone: Viola (Track 5)
Aaron Siegel: Vibraphone (Track 3)
Ryan Jewell: Drums/Percussion/Tabla (Track 3)
Jesse DeRosa: Buchla modular synthesizer (Track 6)
Charles Burst: Percussion (Track 2)
Adam Amram: Congas (Track 2 & 4)
Basic tracks recorded by Matt Walsh at Oceanus in Rockaway, Queens, New York
Overdub recording by Jon Erickson and Peter Kerlin
Mixed by Charles Burst, Stamford, NY, June & July, 2021
Mastered by Mitch Rackin
All songs by Brent Cordero & Peter Kerlin, except Track 4 by Eddie Harris.
