#axacan

This is not an unusual musical landscape in which to find this Virginia-based artist wandering of late. Morning Star, his 2018 release on Three Lobed, opened with a long suite that fed harmonium and fiddle drones into a pool of sound created by his 12-string guitar meanderings and the fuzz of an AM radio. And his 2012 cassette Tamun Shud found Bachman in a tug-of-war with drummer Ian McColm where both players fell in and out of focus. 

Axacan is, then, a continuation of those musical concepts with Bachman’s guitar receding further and further into the distance. Make no mistake, the instrument that he is most closely associated with remains a presence but the bulk of this album is taken up with soundscapes or experimental pieces. “Blue Ocean 0,” for example, is a stormy sea of clashing synth, harmonium, and fiddle overtones (all played by Bachman) with a background drone of what is apparently the sound of the wind blowing through a fishing line. Elsewhere,“Deep Adaptation” takes an already fuzzy field recording and what sounds like a piano and slows the tape way down. The resulting piece feels as if it is being emitted from miles below the earth’s crust. 

When Bachman does set the focus on the guitar, he emphasizes long strums and ringing tones rather than the fleet fingerpicking of some of his previous recordings. On “Year of the Rat,” he explores a single melody with the mind of a jazz improviser — speeding it up, slowing it down, starting the phrase and then quickly abandoning it for another idea. Or just quietly plucking out each note of the main chord to highlight the buzz of the steel strings. “Blues in the Anthropocene” wanes even further. Bachman’s gingerly played guitar passages are nearly subsumed throughout by static and insect chatter for nearly six minutes until a collage of field recordings pushes it aside completely. 

Bachman has reached an exciting stop along his musical evolution. He’s at that point where he keeps returning to the question “What’s next?” as a mantra. After mastering his instrument of choice, it’s a fair thing to ask. Bachman doesn’t try to answer that question on Axacan, but the music teases out a number of possibilities for this curious, restless artist to explore in the hopefully very near future.