Jaunted Haunts Press

Two Great Guitar Albums pt.2: Andre v Rensburg,Nels Cline

It seems to be becoming a habit of mine to write about guitar albums – no surprise there – but also to tackle them in pairs. If you missed my previous lyrical waxing about Marc Ribot and Fred Frith, you can find it here.

Andre van Rensburg – Unfinished Cities

(South of the Border, 2008)

“When he was 6 years old, André van Rensburg strung a guitar string to a plank of wood, attached the other end to his bedroom window bars and yanked the string until it broke. His musical vision has changed little since…”. He has, however, cast a huge shadow in the history of South African leftfield music: his previous projects include the legendary rock trio Supernature (friends of mine from a gig-going generation before me go glassy-eyed when their name is brought up), Ohm (with Brendan Jury), a stint in Battery 9, and the alt-country project Die Menere (with Battery 9 mastermind and One F label boss Paul Riekert). Van Rensburg has since relocated to Taiwan, where he has been pursuing his interest in Eastern melodicism, Derek Bailey’s brittle tone as well as John Zorn’s compositional strategies.

‘Unfinished Cities’ is the second album to contain van Rensburg’s solo compositions, but it features contributions from, among others, violinist Brendan Jury and japanese Koto player Chieko Mori, who mainly provide thin, dissonant backdrops to van Rensburg’s plucky acoustic performances. The opening track ‘Unfinished Cities pt1″ is probably the most seductively melodic piece here, a beautifully winsome composition that nevertheless sets textural tone for the more challenging material that follows.

‘Unfinished Cities’ can be purchased from CDBaby here, and is available in South Africa from One F Music (drop Clair a mail via ‘General Enquiries’).

Andre van Rensburg’s official website is here.

Nels Cline – Coward

(Cryptogramophone, 2009)

Nels Cline is unfortunately best known for being the guitarist of Wilco: a band i’ve just always found too bland to bother with. Yet Cline has a slew of other, less commercially successful projects, in which he explores many other facets of the guitar; such as The Nels Cline Singers.I also remember hearing a track of him playing with saxophonist Paul Flaherty and (my favourite) drummer Chris Corsano, which was just about the most evil, unhinged wall of noise i’ve heard. From what i know, ‘Coward’ is his first solo album, which is quite odd given the length of his career so far but also understandable in the light of his propensity for collaboration.

One of the first things that strike you about ‘Coward’ is the sheer variety of approaches represented on the album: whether this is a good or bad thing depends on whether you are assessing it as a coherent listening experience or whether, like me, you take the breadth of scope to be an almost didactic indication of syntactic possibilities.

Another thing that hits you early on is the fact that Cline has his chops, in the traditional sense. Cline could, if he wanted to, be one of those guys in guitar shops showing off ridiculously complicated licks designed to intimidate prospective young guitarists. The fact that a cluster of later tracks are titled ‘Onan Suite’ might be a wry allusion to this. The lovely acoustic track ‘Prayer Wheel’ centres around a looped motif but plays around it with some impressive, and very effective note runs. The very next track, ‘Thurston County’, however, after cycling through some spidery dissonant arpeggios and glutinous pitch-bent notes, settles into an unabashedly dumbed down two-chord chug that is incredibly ebullient and just so damn good. This is territory that most virtuoso guitarists won’t venture into, but thankfully Cline does. Throughout the rest of the album Cline puts his virtuosity at the service of his compositions, especially on the monumental acoustic piece ‘Rod Poole’s Gradual Ascent to Heaven’, on which sparse motifs evolve slowly into a dissonant frenzy.

Later on in the album, more electronic sound sources and electric guitars come the fore: ‘Onan Suite: Seedcaster’, with it’s lo-fi electronic farts and squawks, sounded so out of character that i thought i’d started listening to a Black Dice album – that alone should be ample testament to how good it is.’Onan Suite: The Liberator’ is another jaunty riff-fest over a straightforward 4/4 drum machine pattern, after which droning closer ‘Cymbidium’ bookends this remarkable album beautifully.

This album is mandatory listening for anyone with an interest in the guitar and its place in future of music.

Read Nels Cline’s notes on ‘Coward’ here.