New Music Review - the autumn

I live in a small town. Adamstown, PA is the antique capitol of the country, apparently. Within a few miles, there are dozens of little antique shops and a few monolithic warehouses that hold relics from the past. Aside from those, there are a few gas stations, a Dunkin Donuts, and a bunch of fields.

The closest “cities” are Reading and Lancaster. Reading, as in Reading Railroad (pronounced red-ing) from Monopoly, is mostly an artistic vacuum; it has little to offer. I’ve met some good people there , but the music isn’t innovative - it's mostly one-dimensional. Lancaster, on the other hand, has a growing arts scene. It’s seen some national acts form within its bounds and they’ve definitely helped the area to grow. Beyond those, we’re not terribly far from Philly; which, like most major cities, boasts its fair share of competent musicians

But in between cities, in rural Pennsylvania, art is somewhat of an anomaly. Art is something you read about from afar. You hear music on the radio there, but it isn’t art …right? As much as I loathe cities, they do art pretty well. Rural Pennsylvania, though much more livable, can be a dreary vacuum of musical irrelevancy at times ...most of the time.

So I try to be musically relevant; I try to make people think and feel in ways that are far more complex than rural PA demands. And sometimes it seems like I’m the only one. The cultural monotony in some areas holds artistic progress in bondage. And it’s dark. The prospects of playing with another Mark Hunsberger seem increasingly unfavorable. Those people don’t exist here to talk to, let alone collab with.

But I recently found a light. Maybe not for collaboration or even to see live. But someone is out there making great music. In Ephrata; a short hop, skip, and jump down the road from Adamstown.

It happened last week. I got my weekly Reverbnation email and saw that my local ranking in the instrumental category had dropped to 7. Not long ago, there weren’t even 7 instrumental acts claiming to be from Denver, PA, so I was intrigued. Having come from Reading, I was expecting a bunch of “beat producers” or something hip-hoppy like that. Occasionally, they'll pop up on the charts, but only fall back to irrevalancy. Yes, there were a few of them on there; however, one of the artists caught my eye, the autumn.

Clearly with a name like the autumn, the act couldn’t be a tasteless wannabe rap producer, could they? The singer-songwriter styled photo further distanced the autumn from what I was expecting. After clicking on their profile, I then saw bands cited in their “sounds like” section the likes of Explosions in the Sky and This Will Destroy You; two of my favorite post-rock bands of all time!

Hitting play on the first track, Migration Patterns, I expected to be disappointed. I expected a poor recording with stagnant writing. Yes, I’m cynical; I’ve held my hopes too high, too often. At best, I was hoping for a cheap knock off of This Will Destroy You. At best.

And then it happened. The first note resounded, masterfully catching every nuance in its droning reverberation, echoing through the space so perfectly laid out for it. And then another, powerfully building sustain. Nearly 30 seconds of single note sonic perfection passed, leading into a textural sea of spacey overdriven guitars, drums, and bass.

These are stories. They’re emotive of their respective titles, aptly named, but in no need of explanation. Each piece flows from note to note with such fluidity as to read as words read within a single breath. There is nothing lost to poor attack or poorly intonated instrument. And tonally, it’s all there.

Later, after further investigation, I discover that it’s just this one guy, Chris; he’s a local worship leader and wanted to do something different, expressing his testimony in music, but not burning out on vocals. Post-rock is the perfect canvas for such expression. And this guy, Chris, nails it. I'm intrigued to hear more about each piece and how it fits into his testimony and why each piece came into existence. There is more meaning interjected into an individual song than in other artists' entire albums.

And I really want to know what kind of mind did all of this. ONE person did this?! Not many people are gifted enough to be able to piece together such intricate, cohesive work.

And, again, this is a single guy. In small-town Lancaster county, nonetheless. There is hope.

 

 

Again, check this out: http://www.reverbnation.com/theautumnmusic

Noise

Maybe you've been wondering what I've been up to for the past two weeks. It seems as though I just dropped off the face of the planet. I haven't blogged, haven't been on facebook much, and haven't tweeted quite as often as I usually do.

The past two weeks have included: graduating, getting a job, looking for a place to live, and moving. Actually, that's all been within the past week, but senior week prior to that was jam-packed with friends and whatnot. Sometime soon there will be a post dedicated to all of these events.

In the meantime, I have a more normal post.

Today, as I completed the setup of my new room, I decided to play guitar and bust out the good 'ole pedal board. Right now, that's a Boss GT-10, Boss RC-20XL, and a PreSonus TubePRE preamp.

This was just a for-fun time for me. A chance to play around with some new sounds and experiment. It wasn't about practicing and it wasn't about writing. It was about sound and music.

I list sound and music separately for a reason. Music is notes, rhythm, meter, and structure. Sound, in this case, is how music interacts with its environment. There is a lot of overlap between the two, but it is important, in this look at things, that they be viewed separately.

As far as the music side goes, I began with some riffs that I have been working on. This includes some real neat math jams as well as some live looping. Once I got into the live looping, as it often times does, it got out of hand.

One of the beauties of live looping is that it allows structure alongside chaos and meshes them seamlessly. When you have effects out the wazoo, you can incorporate this into your jamming. And it's beautiful. The structure/chaos coupling is the basis of a lot of experimental music, including more experimental post-rock.

This is stuff that I live to play. And I use "play" rather loosely. By the end of the jamming, "play" included things like heavily processed feedback loops, rubbing the neck of the guitar on the amp, etc.

This is where music and sound begin to diverge and is why a lot of people don't get or can't handle this type of music.

The music began as the notes and continued as the looped material. The whole jam was music, but only loosely through that structure.

As the jam progressed, parts of it diverged from music to only be sound. The way a guitar feeds-back with delay, reverb, vibrato, and distortion is often times noise; sound free from music. As the sounds build on themselves and take shape, though there are musical undertones in the looped material, the vast soundscapes in the foreground are what you feel.

You feel the music in the sound, but, more prevalently, you feel the sound. It's almost a form of sensory deprivation in that it is all that you sense. You hear sound and connect so deeply that you forget to smell or taste - you only hear.

And then you remove the droning; you turn off the amp suddenly or stop the loop. And there is silence. You go from being entrenched in the sound to being overwhelmed by silence. The noise ends so abruptly that it disorients you and the silence becomes a part of noise.