J.R. Bohannon – Recôncavo
Phantom Limb – 26 April 2019
Brooklyn based solo guitar player (and Ancient Ocean member) J.R. Bohannon’s newly extended mini-album, originally self-released on Bandcamp, now being put out by Phantom Limb records, begins with an improvised song that plays out a bit like a miniature of Glenn Jones‘s ‘Snapshot of Mom, Scotland, 1957’ track, another improvised piece, that kicks off his masterful Wanting album, but with some Latin flavour simmering beneath the surface. However, Bohannon is a mercurial player who, through this twenty-one-minute exploration, patiently changes direction many times. ‘Under the Friar’s Ledge’ is a warm ramble with that wonderful looseness and innocence that often comes from new sounds emerging for the first time. It is a restrained and subtle piece that modestly bows out after three minutes to allow ‘Fluctuation Pt. I’, the album’s biggest track at six minutes, to come in.
This is an important one, a truncated version of ‘Fluctuation’, which, as Bohannon’s first fully realised piece for solo acoustic guitar, signifies his movement into this style of music, while also showing us his individual style. It’s a confident piece too, starting out with a uniformly picked harmonic tune and shifting into a beautifully rich cyclical pattern on the twelve string with some well-placed string bends and a lovely yomping nature. Bohannon then slows things up in the midsection in the habit of Daniel Bachman, before the rolling rhythm takes the tune away from the mic and into more disparate territory, where the notes become more shard-like, echoey and abstract. The result reminds me of an acoustic version of part of Sarah Louise’s ‘Chitin Flight’, where the picked notes scramble around and other each other.
Possibly even better is the title track, which makes the centrepiece. Again, this is unhurried and meditative work; the refrains that underpin the tune are quickly played, but the pulsing, more drone-like playing running with it juxtaposes it and the space created between the stages is what makes the contrasting styles work so well. In less patient hands, the piece could feel jarring, but this player understands ambient music very well and he’s not afraid to allow it into the quite humble world of solo garden acoustic guitar music. A similar effect is achieved on dobro track ‘Whitfield Country’, a piece that immediately brought to mind Allen Karpinski’s ultra-minimalist VDSQ Solo Acoustic Volume Six album. Here Bohannon slows things up even more and lets the slightly mournful notes of the slide repeat in a Ry Cooder way to form a piece that latches onto final track ‘Envelopes’ (which I think is the new addition) to create a medley of sorts. Here the dobro can still be heard in the background alongside the twelve string, which plays a little sombre melody. It’s as subtle as it gets and is the most quietly assured way to end an album of deliberately paced and played gems.
Pre-Order via Phantom Limb https://www.phantom-limb.co.uk/jr-bohannon-reconcavo