DI31
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Cat#: DI31 Artist: J Guy Laughlin Title: Apnoea Date of Release: 10/11/2010 Edition Size: 150 (hand numbered w/gold decocolor) Materials: C30 (BASF chrome stock in imprinted orange shell), 2-color screen print by Mark Price on 100# French paper, gold foil adhesive label, soft polybox. Availability: Sold out at source. |
Description:
If you’re outside the Great Lakes-centric orbit in which he helms the proverbial tubs in pursuit of aesthetic agendas including the affably solvent-damaged sludge of the Puffy Areolas, the void-gazing post-no wave scree of DPI, the prickly, bloodshot pointillism of Heat Death, and his stellar ongoing duos with Mike Forbes, Nate Scheible, and Bbob Drake, you might be forgiven for not having checked J Guy Laughlin to date, but of course that would mean your having slept on his recent and long-overdue forays into solo sesh territory, documented on a split c20 with Forbes/Young Duet (A Sounddesign, 2009) and the recent Solo Percussion, vol. 1 c30 on Wagon. Both of these joints find Laughlin using his newfound isolation to stretch out and lay down a sprawling, muscular, and occasionally zany grammar of his full-kit style, amounting to a rosetta stone for heads looking to parse his singular approach to ensemble improvisation.
Apnoea, however, is an utterly and wonderfully different animal, and for my two cents, the first solo work of Laughlin’s that attains the status of fully realized record-as-statement. There is next to no reliance on the percussive tropes of any going species of out drumming; instead, captured in luscious, bonkers close-mic’d splash zone fidelity by John Delzoppo, one finds an endless, subtly elaborated, and appropriately firey chasm in the floor of time, filled with amplified floor toms, deftly wielded microphones, a burlap sack full of carriage bolts, and a thousand jeweled snuffboxes of rosin, with an aggregate listening payload something like stuffing a Calder mobile into your shirt and staring at a refrigerator-sized block of obsidian all night. Sure to please appreciators of La Monte Young’s Black Album and the hi-res percussive sensibilities of Stapleton, Jackman, and Bayle alike.
Notes:
Recorded by John Delzoppo at Negative Space.
(The liners of the cassette itself read “Recorded by John Delzoppo at the Embassy”, which is not true. Mea culpa.)
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