Town and Country
"c'mon". CD Thrill Jockey,
Chicago
Town and Country
can be marketed using several convenient catch phrases the record
shop dummies are using at the moment. But each label misses the
point terribly. (However smug they are in their (sub) urban ignorance
is bliss lifestyle.)
Town and Country
makes sound on several levels. First, there is the immediatly recognizable
instrumentation that could fit into jazz or rock contexts, depending
on necessity. Second their compositions and overall sound quality
can pass for normal music styles if pressed with a selling point.
Also, if properly taken apart and edited with commerical images,
it could be non descript, yet highly polished soundtrack music.
However, this seemingly
normal music is actually very very strange underneith. But it is
neither wacky like Chadbourne, nor honky like improv, and does not
have any of the tell signs of "strange" music that is
not strange at all, but pathologically sad. The actual nature of
each of these tracks is not in what they are called, but what they
do. They move with careful discipline, a fine tuned system of tone
and silence. But below and around the edges of the sound is the
resonance of the sound, like the meaning between the words, the
shadow behind the mass.
This resonance
is only partly controlled; it is conjured like a snake, and then
left to trail off like skipping stones in the lake, free to go down
in whatever direction they take. These secondary decay tones and
sustain vibrations become increasingly intense with each listen.
Partially stemming from their interest as fine tuned listeners,
it also suggests the improv. idea that this second sound world comes
together as four people in the room are interacting in a highly
personal dialogue that is non-verbal, and more important: not merely
technique. It becomes like a personal code, each member speaks a
formal language that ends as an expression completed. In the air
for all to hear, T&C realize most people only hear the jazz-rock,
so their little secret is safe from the record buying public.
Track number 2
is particularly intense: several timbres repeat quickly and build
inwards, each musician slowly changing their strumming pattern according
to a system (could be as simple as: "change slowly out of phase
"). As the pattern builds and shifts in and out of phase, tones
emerge that seem between the notes, then they seem to be the notes
themselves, figure/ground play. Individual instruments become secondary
to the sound pattern. The result seems electronic and organic at
the same time. If I heard this isolated from its context, I would
first guess it is computer music. But within the context of the
CD, it remains acoustic and "normal", blending in with
the flow. This is strange and cool.
A few tracks do
not hold up for me quite so well, not because they are not nice
and well made, but because they rest on the surface as technical
"songs" and do not go into this second layer of "sounds".
Perhaps I will get into them later.
Great work that
communicates softly within the treacherous world of labels and instrumentation.