#rob frye

Somewhat gentler and more layered than Vettraino’s solo debut, Exercise (2020), this release — named for a line from Haruki Murakami — features slow to mid-tempo tunes that tend to unfold without building to obvious climaxes. The musicians who help him bring his compositions to life, including Rob Frye of the Bitchin’ Bajas (among other projects) on clarinet, flute, and sax, cellist and sound artist Lia Kohl and percussionist Phil Sudderberg, are well known on the Chicago scene.

The tunes, presented in order of increasing length, gradually draw the listener in. The brief opening title track sets the mood with a swoosh of strings and guitar suggestive of a sunrise. Next, “Morning Melody” — the theme of the first half of the day is also reflected in the album’s cover art — with sax and strings dancing over a steady percussion groove, seems to form a kind of suite with “Parallel Play,” which features singer-songwriter and composer Macie Stewart on Wurlitzer and violin and a similar groove and feel.

“Mid Mind” largely dispenses with the groove in favor of an exotica-adjacent sound in a perfect blend of synthetic and acoustic sounds. Vettraino’s guitar is somewhat more prominent on “There Is No Way Not to Choose,” which delivers seven minutes of sonic bliss also shaped by strings and spare piano.

The percussion groove returns on closer “Uplift Two Twenty Two,” which, over more than eight minutes, serves as the summation of what has gone before. Propelled by a sweet horn ostinato and a keening flute, the track is suggestive of heading out into the bustle of a morning in the city.

While this album is distinctive, I hear similarities to, among other things, some of the projects released on the Hubro record label, the Henry Kaiser-Jim O’Rourke project Acoustics, and, Peter Walker’s Rainy Day Raga and Second Poem to Karmela. Whether Vettraino is familiar with or interested in these antecedents is unclear, but A Bird Shaped Shadow will certainly appeal to anyone who is. Putting this record on, pouring a cup of coffee, and sitting by a sunlit window are an almost certain recipe for a nice day.

Almost in the manner of Cage’s 4’33” — Cage being known for his attempts to mitigate the effects of his personality and artistic will on his compositions — “2303” and its neutral title invite the tautological observation that this music simply is what it is. What you hear in the specified duration, in other words, is best experienced as an in-the-moment(s) experience of listening, free of the influence of language. It’s stuff that doesn’t lend itself to description, summary or conceptual propping up. Well, that last may be one of the places Cage and Bitchin Bajas part ways, since the latter’s stoner persona corresponds to music more likely to bewitch the powers of attention than hone them, more likely to transport the listener to a deeper inner space than awaken them to the world around them. There’s nothing wrong with that, since either method could be argued as the key to finding a pure state of consciousness. And as Cooper Crain asks, “Doesn’t everyone want to find a pure state of consciousness?”  

Lofty goal — just the kind scared off by active pursuit. That’s why the band comes at it sideways, putting the listener at ease with the album’s disarmingly silly title before kicking things off. “Jammu” bubbles to the surface with nimble science-lab synths, gradually solidifying into a moving-but-static Terry Riley motorik. “Circles on Circles” further exploits the polyrhythmic tendencies of pulse and arpeggio, building a jam with just enough detail — simple percussion, organ swells, fizzy synth adornments — to focus the listener without calling undue attention to itself. Even these shorter tracks hover around the 10-minute mark, but with good — which is to say not self-indulgent — reason: Extreme length (plus a fair amount of repetition) gives the music room to breathe and grow as if on its own, shifting the emphasis from “Look what these musicians created” to “Look what this music can do.”  

The double album’s second side finds the group retreating further from the spotlight, in a sense. Though Bitchin Bajas has never been guarded about their influences — just in case you couldn’t sense Robert Fripp’s shadow on their Drag City debut, they named it Bitchitronics — they don’t often make the transmission of musical inheritance cover-version efficient. Their take on Sun Ra’s classic “Angels and Demons at Play” is wonderfully elongated and gauzily muted, almost as if beamed in from a far-away cosmos. The clanging, shimmering “Yonaguni,” on the other hand, finds the trio ceding prime sonic real estate to guest musicians Nori Tanaka and Masaki Batoh, whose contributions on percussion and guitar give the track much of its definition.  

On the other side of the pacific expanse that is “2023,” “Chokayo” takes the idea of letting the music speak for itself almost literally, exploiting the vocal qualities of its wah-ing synths and cooing flutes to weave a kind of gently respiring instrumental chorus. Finally “Be Going” and its mildly exhortatory valediction, ends the album by setting Rob Frye’s fluttering, soporific sax against slowly churning organ and synth drones. Eighty minutes after Bajas Fresh started, it eases back into silence: a long album to be sure, but only exactly as long as it needs to be — no more, no less.