#tarentel

[dialoogid]

Tarentel - When We Almost Killed Ourselves (1999)

[dustedmagazine]

Danny Paul Grody — Arc of Day (Three Lobed)

Arc of Day by Danny Paul Grody

Danny Paul Grody got his start in Tarentel and the Drift, both abstract post-rock bands out of San Francisco who leaned towards the quieter end of the guitar rock experiment. Just over a decade ago, he ventured out on his own in The Fountain, a gorgeous, mostly solo guitar album that found serenity in repeated picked patterns and subtle threads of melody. Since then, he’s made a half dozen albums under his own name, showcasing a self-taught facility with finger-picked styles and an expansive open-minded outlook that seeks the boundaries of blues, jazz, folk and drone.

Arc of Day starts with Grody on his own, but slowly adds other textures—drums and bass from his mates in the Drift, Rich and Trevor Montgomery, an especially haunting clarinet from Jonathan Sielaff of Golden Retriever and, on one track, Chuck Johnson on pedal steel.  

He begins on acoustic 12-string in “Daybreak” a serene and introspective reverie in simple, octave-jumping figures, repeated like clockwork and surrounded with shivering clouds of overtone. “Light Blooms” brings in his collaborators, adding a faint touch of electric distortion and a whisper of shaken maracas to his mandala-like guitar motifs. Grody sets the piece in motion, executing the same rhythmic figure again and again, keeping it going (and also very still) through changes in mood and key. We hear the clarinet for the first time in this second cut. It cuts through with pensive clarity and, at one point, frays into a vibrato, the held note unfurling like a pennant in strong wind.

One more player—the natural world—joins in “California Angelica.” We drift into the piece on a roar of surf, a little foghorn tucked into it. “Cathedral Tree” adds the unmistakable silvery sheen of Chuck Johnson’s axe to one of the disc’s most rock-like entries. “Slow Walk” electrifies Grody’s patient picking, adding a buzz and heft of dissonance to its limpid surfaces. The disc isn’t long, but it builds its own calm, centered world. It quiets the noise and pulls you in. Beautiful.  

Jennifer Kelly

[musicmakesyousmart]

Tarentel - Fear of Bridges

Three Lobed Recordings

2002

[voskhozhdeniye]

Tarentel - A Cloud No Bigger Than A Man's Hand

[zombimanos]

[accidental-memory]

A brief aside on one of my favorite albums: Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun, by Tarentel.

Ghetto Beats... is two and a half hours long. It can easily fit into the genres of noise, prog, ambient, and post-rock. I want to focus on the percussion.

The band's drummer takes a very interesting approach, where the drums typically do not create a beat or a time signature for the rest of the instrumentation, but rather add one more layer to the cacophony of these songs. And as a drummer's job is generally to bang out the same rhythm line after line, it is worth noticing, particularly without the accompaniment matching his beat, that every repetition has some kind of variation, sometimes clearly intentional and other times through imperfect execution, and yet both of these only ever add to the experience.

Yet despite the percussion being a standout performance, the album itself does not even feature percussion for half of its duration! In fact, on the second disc, after the first song, we get an entire contiguous 42 minutes and 38 seconds of music with no drums whatsoever. It is not until 11 minutes 17 seconds into the song "Somebody Fucks With Everybody" that the drums finally kick back in. I utterly love the confident audacity of this choice.

If you fuck with any of the genres listed above, I think you'll find something to take away from this album.

[floodbrother]

assorted album art I love (part 1)

[zombimanos]