Cassette
Early Music, the shifting collective of musicians led by the now Stockholm-based multi-instrumentalist Jon Collin, returns with its second long-player of the year in Reeds, once again issued as a characteristically smartly packaged tape on the man's imprint of the same name. Is there a wider underlying reason why Collin is now involved with both a label and group fashioned with the same moniker? Well, in a sense, there's something definitive about the ideas being explored and realised here. Reeds isn't really much out of step with what Collin has been doing for the past 15+ years, whether under his own name or with others (and perhaps even a sequel of sort to Bridge Variations?), but it is undeniably very much within the elite zone for anyone with an interest in emotionally rich, somewhat ineffable string-driven drone-ambience. The appropriately titled minute-and-a-half long 'Come In' opens affairs with the gentle hush of diegetic sound - bird song, wind, running water - swept around sparkling zither and various other arcing stringed instruments, giving off the feeling of communal invitation, a doorway into song. Once inside, that feeling is only heightened, the various, seemingly improvised, layered arrangements of strings and field recordings building to a near-cosmic, certainly transcendent take on the American Primitive tradition, that's actually much less primitive than it is transgressive, and kind of effortlessly part of the same avant garde school of thinking that might have housed La Monte Young, Tony Conrad or Harry Partch. Fans of Jon Collin will have had a lot of music to listen to over the years. Why, then, even more? The answer to that question might also provide the response to the earlier question of why now have a band and label of the same name - this is simply some of his best work. Joining with others appears to have ushered something even greater from Collin.
FFO: Jon Collin, Old Saw, Harry Partch, La Monte Young, John Fahey
