Cassette
Two newly coined projects of familiar personage unite for a split cassette on Simon Joyner's consistently great Grapefruit imprint (remember those recent Eye records? The Dadamah, Builders and the Garbage and the Flowers reissues? True form). Early Music, as the sharper tacs amongst you may have already deduced, is formed of a loose collective of musicians associated with Jon Collin's label of the same name. Here they are captured live in concert in Stockholm with Collin joined by Karl Boson, improvising a performance of redolent string-based transcendence, the intersection of double bass, electric guitar and nyckelharpa coalescing into something, that although still nuanced, is actually quite euphoric. A classic Collin masterclass in subtle interpolations of texture and tone. On the flip is Ancient Music, the assumed moniker of Boxhead Ensemble's Michael Krassner. His 35 minutes encompass a flowing suite of interconnected guitar miniatures that pay tribute to filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu, and amount to a stately performance of what Delilo called the 'afternoon dèrive' - journeys through (sub)urban landscapes and "varied ambiances". Krassner plays with a soft hand, leaving much space in between his floating guitar figures that often recall Loren Connors and the more reigned in experiments of Vini Reilly. The kind of sound that removes you from your current moment and positions you in a separate imagined zone.
