#marginal frequency

Despite being inspired by the aural ambience of city living, this music brings to mind human-free, vistas. As its long tones coalesce and diverge, overtones ripple like a canopy of leafy foliage seen from above as it bends and shakes under the influence of gusting breezes. Just as one might look for patterns in the leaves, Junkan (2020) invites the listener to find whatever order or disorder they seek in the crosshatching and convergence of slowly bowed strings and patiently blown woodwinds. Attend to both performances back-to-back and the thickening textures induced by the second edition’s extra clarinets will conspire with your pattern-seeking brain layers of perception that disappear into each other like the infinite reflections of two mirrors facing each other in a dimly lit room. 

Wait, isn’t there a record to be discussed here? There is, and it’s a lovely one. Alexander Garsden is a guitarist (and composer, electronic musician and planner of experimental music events) from Melbourne, Australia. Since Australia is remote, it behooves its residents who are interested in unusual sounds to get out of town and make some connections, and this record appears to be the product of a creatively motivated walkabout. Each of its eight tracks is a duet, named for a city associated with the other guitarist, but not necessarily where they live now. The pieces bear names like “Tokyo 20,” which suggests that Garsden and his Japanese duet partner, Tetuzi Akiyama, recorded quite a few pieces that didn’t make it to the record. Stockholm is indubitably where David Stackenäs resides. But Melbourne? Maybe Julia Reidy lived there once, and maybe the tracks she plays on were recorded there, but she’s been based in Berlin for years. Anyway, if Garsden got to travel to make this record, the poor guy isn’t doing so in 2020; he’s spent chunks of the year confined to small subsections of his city. But at least he got to put out this a CD of music that’ll take you places. 

Geographical discussion probably doesn’t get you to the point of why you need to hear Of Another, but its gatefold picture might. Nowhere on the sleeve will you learn if the album’s music was improvised, composed or played in a way that accesses the virtues of both methods. Garsden’s not telling. Maybe, like a good writer, he prefers to show you what he wants you to know. While each of these duets places him in the company of one of the other guitarists, you have to listen closely to catch what he does. Garsden’s playing is like a mirror, reflecting the other player’s sounds in the listener’s direction.  The rippling, 12-string fingerings on “Melbourne 04” can’t come from someone other than Julia Reidy. But these duets don’t just spotlight her sound, they foreground her actual playing, which is becoming easier not to notice amidst the increasingly elaborate production of her solo albums. The intertwining, fractal shapes of “Tokyo 16” evoke images of a DNA strand bent upon expanding its slender bulk rather than reproducing some larger organism. Akiyama’s performances here take you to the reactive, non-boogying corner of his musical consciousness (Not that there’s anything wrong with boogying; here’s hoping that Akiyama someday cuts an album with David Nance). And “Stockholm 02” radiates the bright woodiness of Stackenäs’ sound, which you might already know from his work with Fred Lonberg-Holm or Tri-Dim. The tiny burst from each plucked string is as essential to his playing as the big, swelling sound is to Reidy’s and the changing constellation of sounds is to Akiyama’s. And Garsden? He’s the light that illuminates these qualities. So maybe he’s neither the whole fruit nor the chewed up one; he’s the guy pointing the camera.