Label: Meta Records, 2021
Personnel - Adam Rudolph: conduction, composition, arrangements, handrumset (#9); Liberty Ellman: electric guitar; Nels Cline: electric guitar; Miles Okazaki: electric guitar; David Gilmore: electric guitar; Kenny Wessel: electric guitar; Joel Harrison: electric guitar, national steel guitar; Marco Cappelli: acoustic guitar; Jerome Harris: electric guitar, bass guitar, lap steel guitar; Damon Banks: bass guitar.
This music composed and spontaneously conducted by the acclaimed American percussionist Adam Rudolph for his Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra is atypically enchanting. The high-wire interplay between nine widely different but compelling New York-based guitarists gets to an unconventional sonic escapism that’s equally beguiling and provocative. Resonant Bodies is the 12th installment in Rudolph’s Go: Organic Orchestra series, launched in 2001, and uses his prototypical approach with interval matrices, cosmograms and ostinatos of circularity. The titles of the tracks are the names of stars in the Cygnus cluster.
“Parallax” begins this journey with jagged guitar specks and electronic effects before a rhythmic motion becomes noticeable. The bass follows the idea creating a 10-beat cycle figure that gradually spreads among the crew of musicians. This one is immediately followed by “Albireo”, in which a two-way guitar conversation give the music an abstract shape before rock-infused solos take place over a trance-dancing Eastern pulsation.
The virtuosity of the guitarists involved are occasionally hidden behind the discreet, minimal and spacious foundations. “Mira” serves as an example, where airy chordal elongations support foreboding distorted sounds. Resonant, full-bellied bass notes are added both near the beginning and before the end.
Despite the feast of ostinatos engraved on “Dolidze”, there’s this guitar plasticity that avoids rigidness. Actually, the latter piece is deliciously polyrhythmic, an electro-acoustic psychedelic outfit with occasional parallel trajectories between bass and acoustic guitar, funky wah-wah sounds, samba groove and wild, simultaneous soloing, before ending in pure ecstasy.
Including vibrating drones and scintillating fluxes, “Cygnus” embraces a similar experimental electronic ambiance found in the music of some 20th-century avant-garde composers, like Stockhausen, Varèse and Xenakis. By contrast, “Fawaris” features animated jazz dialogues and contrapuntal figures liable to create atonal configurations of sound as they collide.
The closing piece, “Deneb”, is the only one featuring Rudolph’s percussion as he plays an Afro-centric rhythm on his handrumset, surrounded by a counterpoint of texture.
Rudolph stands at the vanguard of his productive generation of music creators. His methods and impromptu ways managed to make guitars sounding like if they’re not, and there’s definitely something new here worth exploring.
B+
Favorite Tracks:
02 - Albireo ► 06 - Dolidze ► 09 - Deneb