Thuja and Alastair Galbraith & Matt De Gennaro

Thuja

Ghost Plants (Emperor Jones)

Alastair Galbraith & Matt De Gennaro

Long Wires in Dark Museums (Vol. I) (Emperor Jones) Like documentary filmmakers, there's a segment of musicians obsessed with the idea that reality is the most powerful medium. Musique concrete collagists like Luc Ferrari, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and even Negativland use field recordings and samples of everyday sounds and recombine them to suit their own muse. A different stab at this kind of musical vérité is taken by Thuja, four improvisers who re-create the sounds of nature and culture using exclusively live instruments, both traditional and those found by the side of the road. Featuring Steven R. Smith of solo and Mirza fame, Ghost Plants is rich in scenery, and leans on a wide variety of casual-sounding percussive sounds. Like Ron Fricke's 1992 film Baraka, Ghost Plants works as a scenic ethnography, taking us eastward via fretwork that lands somewhere between Eastern traditional music and the sound of rusty bedsprings. The most successful tracks are dominated by an eerie organ that hums like the wind swirling around a jagged mountain. Ghost Plants is captivating at times, but like life itself, it falls into tedium for long stretches. More consistently successful is the sonic exploration of fellow Emperor Jones release Long Wires in Dark Museums (Vol. I), by noted New Zealand lo-fi song collagist Alastair Galbraith and experimental stateside musician Matt De Gennaro. Long Wires is culled from shows the duo played in a pitch-black New Zealand church in which they strung long pieces of piano wire across the room and made eerie tones by bowing the wire with rosined hands. It's an application first pioneered by former Austinite Ellen Fullman, who invented the 90-foot Long Stringed Instrument, and the result is a rich, multitextured drone. Galbraith accompanies De Gennaro on minimal guitar loops and violin and on a second wire, and the tonal purity of the sound as it resonates and bounces off the walls of the church is simultaneously soothing and engaging.

(Thuja)

(Galbraith & De Gennaro)