This October sees the release of ‘Plainly Mistaken’, the fourth solo album from Durham, North Carolina multi-instrumentalist Nathan Bowles, one which his label, Paradise of Bachelors, describe as playfully subversive.
On the mind-blowing lead-track The Road Reversed, our Tune of the Day, that subversion is backed up by some urgent bowed double bass from Casey Toll (Jake Xerxes Fussell, Mt. Moriah) and some gorgeous minimalist percussion from Rex McMurry (CAVE). Over this can be heard Bowles’ driving banjo. Together the trio sound both minimalist and large, grand and understated…an outstanding ten-minute track that is unleashed and blissed-out.
Toll and McMurry feature on five of the nine tracks and are “integral to the record’s ambitious palette and limber but exacting rhythmic structures.”
“Nathan is brainy and bookish and likes whiskey. He has that intense air that can fall away to mirth. His approach to music appears curious, knowledgeable, playful, intuitive, still. He knows he has a thing going on, and that he can apply that thing to things! To many different things. Maybe that thing is the grand blankness of seeing everything at once. Or maybe it is a pinhole vision that soothes and subjects in its narrowness.
“I think these new songs nurture their dialectic opposites, and that is their appeal—the drone has the aspect of melody, the melody has the aspect of drone. I don’t think Nathan has ever ridden a dolphin, but I think if faced with the task he would cotton quick. That’s how I see his approach to his music.” – Bill Callahan
Pre-Order Plainly Mistaken: http://smarturl.it/PoB43