Ghost Blues: Loren Connors at ISSUE 9/11/10
In honor of ISSUE’s upcoming Thursday, Nov. 18 sets with Loren Connors, High Aura'd, Tom Carter (solo guitarist from Charalimbides), and Barn Owl, fma is giving a shout-out to the fantastically haunting improvisational performance Loren Connors shared at ISSUE last September. Solo with his guitar and pedals, Loren brought a piece together from a series of quiet, speculatively bluesy chord progressions. If you’re familiar with Loren’s music, the performance should remind you his excitingly weird structural experimentation from the late ‘70s.
Loren’s September performance is a set of extreme cycling: he goes from shaping cerebrally minimalist themes to saturating nervously large chord progressions with reverb. Its introduction sounds like heavy clouds rolling off the guitar until the volume fades, reverb clears away, and the theme takes a step back into quiet blue delicacy, like watching an insect walk on water and bargaining with the surface tension. The most basic motif that shows up here is a diminished second –a classic blues chord– but Loren gives it such abstract, melodically disparate variations that you can only compare this performance to a ghost of the traditional blues.
But it’s a lovely ghost, even in its murkiest and most frantic moments. Towards the middle of the piece, the atmosphere thins out until a sparse, precise melody slips into harriedly chasing itself among reverb and volume, so that colossal shapes materialize and disintegrate before fading back into abstract space, all the more eerie for the climax’s recent urgency. The pattern resurfaces: the piece is schizophrenically saturated and then eerily quiet, but this is the blues, never blissed out pop or myopic sound art. No matter how disparate or dense the piece gets, Loren plays it like a folk musician, experimenting with a traditional vocabulary. He improvises beautifully, keeping the piece self-contained while making every movement a step forward.
