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Crowhurst and Gavin Bryars — Incoherent American Narrative (Prophecy)
If you are familiar with the magisterial compositions and cello playing of Gavin Bryars and the noisy, unpleasant racket created by the ongoing project called Crowhurst, you may be somewhat confounded upon seeing their names on the same record. But their collaboration on this new LP, Incoherent American Narrative, issues in a series of effective, by turns discomfiting and moving musical experiences. Different as their sonic profiles are — and to be sure, those differences are partly rhetorical, artifacts of the culture industry’s need to create market niches and the phrases that name them — the two men play to each other’s strengths on Incoherent American Narrative. Bryars provides some samples, ranging from bowed strings to haunting human voices to stuff that sounds like heavy industry in process, and Crowhurst (here the project’s founder Jay Gambit, in his solo, harsh noise mode) digitally manipulates them with a solemn, rigorous and relatively restrained sensibility. It’s a really good record.
Gavin Bryars is likely the better known figure to most readers of Dusted. His widely renowned works include The Sinking of the Titanic and Hommages; both are within the ambit of modern composition’s minimalist tradition. Much of his best later music has continued in that mannerly vein (interested parties should seek out his contributions to On Photography, recorded by the Latvian Radio Choir in 2005, and his remarkable string quartets). Gambit’s recordings under the Crowhurst moniker run from a seemingly endless supply of CDRs and independently released harsh noise LPs, to a recent interest in sludgy black metal, recorded with a full band. The two men met at a workshop Bryars conducted in the French Pyrenees. Incoherent American Narrative is the refined version of the exchange of sounds and ideas that began there.
Noise is a notoriously loose, problematically subjective category, and one hesitates to invoke it here. It’s as applicable and as hopelessly misleading as the other markers for genre one could cite in relation to these sounds: drone, electronic music, avant-garde minimalism. But noise might be truest to the range of affects the music inspires. It’s pretty fearsome stuff, as some track titles indicate: “Blistered Glaciers,” “Dead Swans of Dreams.” Like those titles, the music has romantic, cinematic scope, and the resulting synaesthetic imagery skews toward the unhappy ends of the experience called “the sublime.” Snowy, remote nighttime mountains rise and glower down at the listener. Avian necks extend and dip earthward, dewy feathers moldering.
The title affixed to the record is less easily scanned. It’s unclear what’s especially “American” about this music. The title might be a nod to Philadelphia-based Gambit’s role as performer. His fingers were on the keyboard, interfacing with the software that selected, intensified and deformed the samples created and recorded by Bryars. Hence Gambit is largely responsible for the “narrative” that an engaged listener might attempt to conjure while listening to the record’s dynamics and movement through time. And as “incoherent” as the songs’ relations to genre or marketing schemes might be, their effects are insistent, powerful and well worth hearing.
