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Bad News From Houston: Bad News From Houston: In The Valley of the Cloud Builder
ByUnlike Thollem, who has has extensive and rigorous training in classical music, Dieterich is an autodidact whose earliest musical experiences were in free-improvised settings. Though best-known for his work with Deerhoof, Dieterich has also worked with Jeremy Barnes (of Neutral Milk Hotel and A Hawk and a Hacksaw), Ben Goldberg and Scott Amendola. He's been working with McDonas for a few years, and In The Valley of the Cloud Builder is the duo's second recording. It sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. Much of the music on In The Valley of the Cloud Builder is dense and surreal. Yet, it is not directionless or random. On the contrary, each one of the album's ten pieces is highly organized and plotted out. While it's readily apparent that at least one of the dominant processes going on here is improvisation, In The Valley of the Cloud Builder is more about experimentation with sound; how it's produced, how it's captured, and when it's captured. What I can say is that the music doesn't seem to be connected to any single genre, though some of McDonas' inventions sound like something Conlon Nanacarrow might've come up with if he'd worked with a prepared player piano. There's a playfulness and innocence to this music that sets it well apart from most avant-garde or experimental music.
Several of the pieces start out as acoustic duets, only to be hurled into an otherworldly melange of whirring, buzzing samples, cheap electronics, prepared piano, disembodied voices and found percussion. The passages dominated by acoustic piano and acoustic guitar are often strangely beautiful and delicate, with McDonas' lonesome minor key chords casting a veil of sad mystery over Dieterich's gnarly John Fahey-esque inventions. Several pieces"They War," "Mile High Desert Meadow Tea," "Red Dirt Meet," and "Stone Juice"have passages of truly beautiful acoustic music before moving into other areas. The pair also seem to come up with insane, repetitious music-box like creations that hint at a sort of minimalism, yet are so texturally dense that one hesitates to use the term. On every tune, Dieterich and McDonas embark on deep timbral explorations of their respective instruments. While McDonas' prepared piano forms the backbone of the session, some of the sounds seem to be the result of close-miking their instruments, or recording one vibrating sympathetically in response to the other being played. Though their methods are not discussed in detail, the results are stunning. Whatever they're doing, the result has an almost luxurious aural richnessgrainy, lo-fi environmental snippets lap up against pure layered tones of unknown origin. In The Valley of the Cloud Builder is one of those albums one can listen to over and over without ever hearing it the same way twice.
Track Listing
Red Dirt Meet; Make It Fall; They War; Changery; Middle Man Problems; Confuse the Ghosts; Invisible River; Stone Juice; Inverted Mountain.
Personnel
Thollem McDonas: piano, prepared piano, voice, percussion, sounds; John Dieterich: acoustic and electric guitars, bass, electronics, processing, voice, percussion, sounds.
Album information
Title: Bad News From Houston: In The Valley of the Cloud Builder | Year Released: 2013 | Record Label: Post-consumer Llc
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