Daniel Bachman – The Morning Star
Three Lobed Recordings – 27 July 2018
Since living with this epic new disc from Virginia based acoustic guitarist and Weissenborn instrumentalist Daniel Bachman for quite a while, his decision to put out his second self-titled album in 2016 has become clear. Listening back to that record and lengthy tracks like the beautiful ‘Brightleaf Blues’, with Bachman’s drawn-out slide playing alongside Forrest Marquisee’s home-made octotone creating a droning meditation, The Morning Star seems like a giant leap forward into the experimental mind of an artist who has all but left behind the standard structure and sound of an American Primitive or instrumental acoustic guitar album. If Daniel Bachman hinted at the new direction Bachman was heading in, this set finds it and also disregards all genre boundaries and refuses to be categorised.
The eighteen minute opener ‘Invocation’ could have come from the same sessions that produced ‘Brightleaf Blues’, but this piece is far more expansive, bringing in chimes, AM radio recordings and fiddle to blend alongside Bachman’s twelve-string playing, which seems to deliberately take a back seat here and let Ian McColm’s harmonium and Marquisee’s fiddle create the drone while percussion adds extra disparate qualities. It is the sort of sonic journey that perhaps expresses the personal upheaval and anxieties in Bachman’s own life since his last recording, because where ‘Brightleaf’ was a calm rumination, ‘Invocation’ is spikier, denser and more challenging. In comparison, ‘Sycamore City’ is a more straight up guitar piece, albeit with a bright field recording of humming insects and rain showers running with it and the sounds of cars passing and honking in the background. Against this busyness, the guitar playing is gently sparse and rambling, creating a walk in a meadow with a road running through it. The effect is quietly mesmerising.
After the dark and swirling (and guitarless) organ, AM radio and field recording collage that is ‘Car’, ‘Song for the Setting Sun III’ again appears to be a more conventional unfussy guitar track, but Bachman seems less interested in writing conventional pieces of tune and melody these days and more focused on creating the space around the notes and letting the microphone pick up all sorts of nuances of string buzz and outdoor sound at the same time. At one point on the song, a police siren is heard faintly at first and then louder until it apparently screeches past the open window where Bachman is playing. It immediately links the piece with the previous ‘Car’ and its political speech recordings and somehow subtly refers to a modern America Bachman is now struggling to get to grips with. The picked ‘III’ leads directly into ‘Setting Sun IV’, a Weissenborn piece with an urgent pattern and uneasy slide movements. Partway through the song, Bachman seems to thread some kind of mute through some of the strings to create an even more unnerving sound, with different notes jumping out and catching the ear. It’s another trick that hints at the various turbulences that perhaps led to this recording. Because, as chaotic guitar pieces like ‘Scrumpy’ demonstrate, although not an obviously political project, Morning Star is an album with a sharp tongue and among the beauty that shines through is plenty of unrest, unease and anger. It makes for powerful and original music.
That said, final track ‘New Moon’, a nearly fourteen-minute patient piece bringing in cicadas and organ to work alongside Bachman’s more relaxed and less edgy slide guitar brings more light in. This is a cathartic song, a cleansing track full of space and its change in shape to much of what has come before explains its title. ‘New Moon’ really is the only song that can finish this incredible, huge journey of an album. The playing is at once spare, playful and innocent, lacking much of the edge apparent in ‘Scrumpy’ or ‘Song for the Setting Sun IV’. It is an Indian head massage of a piece to finish a set that, once it gets in there, will probably blow your mind.
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http://danielbachman.com/
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Photo Credit: Greta Svalberg