#jon collin

Jon Collin, who is an Englishman transplanted to Sweden, recorded From a Petrified Forest during a springtime day trip to Tyresta National Park, which is a short drive from Stockholm. While the forest sustained some fire damage about 20 years ago, it’s reasonable to speculate that every tree he encountered during that day was made of wood. One wonders if the title refers more to an experience or state of mind?  

The album’s first track (they are numbered, not named) documents a purposeful stride into the forest, letting you know that you’re leaving the urban everyday behind. The second introduces Collin’s acoustic guitar. Playing slide in a style that combines Hindustani expressiveness with Delta reflection, he bends notes upon a sound stage bounded by breezes, birds and wind shear. As the side progresses, he switches techniques, picking intricate melodies at an unhurried rate guaranteed not to overstimulate any listener. He sounds alone in his humanity, and it’s easy to hear the sounds of flora and fauna and imagine him imagining those sounds stretching back into pre-history. The forest behind him isn’t necessarily petrified, but the ones that now are were once just like the one where he is playing. Reverse the tape and things get more meditative. Collin extracts buzzes and hums from one guitar, perhaps with an Ebow, while playing pensive phrases on another guitar that sounds like it has been modified with attachments to the strings. The sounds of the outdoors recede and then return, and Collin’s guitar gets more distant; perhaps he’s walking away as he plays? The last sounds are footsteps, the sounds of one person departing an enduring environment.  

While the contents of From a Petrified Forest match those of the two volumes of Water & Rock Music that Feeding Tube has reissued in the past year, the differences in playing technique and foregrounding of forest sounds make the record feel like an artifact of a one-time experience. By documenting his recurrent journeys into the woods, Collin conveys the worth that they have to him. And by making music that is humble, beautiful, and different each time, perhaps he argues with each album that we should really try not to petrify the forests during our lifespans. 

Many of the participants tilt traditional styles into the space age, marrying finger-picked precision with a vortex howl of feedback. Daniel Bachman’s “Morning Song,” scatters cascades and swirls of acoustic guitar over a sustaining electric buzz, decanting the beauty of his instrument over a cracked industrial baseline. Kryssi Battalene’s “Blazing Star” brings the sputter of electronics further to the front, coaxing a skirling, bagpipe-ish melody out of a blinding onslaught of fuzz. Michael Morley follows a lyrical, contemplative melody through echoing caverns of downed power line crackle, creating eerie, dreamlike spaces that are half bucolic, half apocalyptic.

Others play the folk a little straighter, letting the acoustic notes speak for themselves, a la Rob Noyes’ “Seven-Faced Bird” and Bill MacKay’s “Living in a Movie” and Jon Collin’s very lovely “Cooper’s Last Ride.” A few warp traditional forms just slightly out of true, as in Bill Nace’s sharp-edged, oddly-angled “Untitled” blues, or in slouching, slanting, refracted folk of Wendy Eisenberg’s “Porch Song.” But more venture way, way out onto fragile limbs, making guitars sing songs they didn’t know they had in them. Bruce Russell’s “Auricular” warps feedback and overtone into giant kinetic sound sculptures, ending with a long dopplering tone that shimmers like flame, and Campbell Neal’s “Dawns Azure Devil” glows with spooky, disembodied phosphorescence, silvery chinks of strings pinging off long sawing tones. Mike Shiflet shrouds noise and drone in soft, shimmering auras, every note vibrating against itself, nothing definite, nothing limited. The best cut on the disc is Loren Connors’ eerie god-storm “The Meteor” with its murmured, echoing-through-cathedral voices and skittery string sounds.

Carbon Records set out to celebrate a quarter century in independent music and ended up documenting the range and beauty of contemporary experimental guitar. Happy birthday to the label. Happy listening to us.

Collin, who currently lives in Stockholm, plays his guitar with a similar disregard for incidental sound, audibly knocking the slide against the neck and occasionally moaning along with his swooping licks. Anyone who has heard the early recordings of Loren MazzaCane Connors will note the similarity, but Collin turns these tools to different expressive ends. Connor’s voice conveyed existential panic, late-night terror at the thought that he might be truly alone. Collin, on the other hand, seems to be expressing small but real comfort. The water and rocks and all the outdoors sounds that his microphone picks up on these six tracks, which were recorded near a lake in Bromma, Sweden, may not care about Collin, but he sounds at ease in their presence.  

The convergence of Collin and his environment projects a carefully selected image; in addition to campgrounds, beaches and lakes, Bromma hosts an airport and upscale residential communities that voted heavily for the right wing in Sweden’s last election. This is a bit like getting back to nature in a bedroom community on the train line from Connecticut to Manhattan. But the project is consistent with earlier efforts where Collin picked up a chunk of wood, made cassette cases out of it, and then made as many cassettes as he had cases. Life, it seems, is what you make out of it. And what Collin makes here is quite lovely. His slide playing compares favorably with that of Jack Rose or Daniel Bachman. Like them, he has taken the stillness found in a sensitively played alap (the unaccompanied portion of a raga) and turned it to his own expressive ends.