#el studio

Soft Opening is the work of three friends—Phil Manley of Trans Am, Donny Newenhouse of KQED radio and Phil Becker—who happen to own a recording studio together. They started playing together mostly to test out their equipment, liked what they heard and went with it. Though they all play actual instruments (guitar, bass, drums), in a real sense what they are playing here is their studio. The music came out of improvisation but was cut, pasted, edited and polished on the recording deck. Like Manley’s other projects (Trans Am, the Fucking Champs), the music runs hard and loud and super clean, channeling the roar of metal through math-y complexities and ecstatic repetition until it is something else entirely.

This disc contains three tracks, two of them rather lengthy. After the operatic excesses of “Space Voyage Mission,” “Wormgear” feels earthier and more elemental, its bass/drums foundation brought forward in the mix, so that the guitar leads splinter and careen from this unrelenting foundation. The final cut, charmingly named “Specificity (Or What Have You),” is lighter and brighter, radiant splays of guitar notes spattering a terse and tetchy beat, not far off from certain Oneida cuts (another band in which Manley is a member). This last cut has the disc’s catchiest sung melody, whose uplifting vibe is undercut somewhat by the lyrics (“Time is a corrosive fluid/Dissolving motivation/Destroying flight, leaching the joy from life”).  

But though the words are nihilistic, the mood is anything but. You can sense the joy of three guys playing together, finding art and amusement in a few hours between work assignments and letting things run until they’re over. Terry Gross the radio personality might have a few questions for Terry Gross the band, but it all seems pretty clear to me.