#robert poss

Poss will be familiar to habitues of New York’s no wave minimalist scene. In addition to the multi-guitared Band of Susans, he has collaborated with Rhys Chatham and Phill Niblock. E-Clark Cornell is less of a known quantity, though he has an extensive discography under the latome2 name and has collaborated with cosmic electronicists including Hans-Joachim Roedelius of CLUSTER, HaDi Schmidt, and Michael Hoffmann. The two first joined forces for 2024’s Definitive Spaces, a four-cut EP of extended meditations in tone wash, piano and clattering percussion.

Kepler’s Choice is sleeker and more elegant, its sound billowing forth like an alternative reality’s orchestral movie soundtracks. It’s not clear who did what. There’s very little in recognizable guitar tone, though that doesn’t mean Poss isn’t playing one. A Dusted review of his 2018 solo album, Frozen Flowers Curse the Day observes: “Robert Poss plays the guitar like Magritte paints smoking implements, distorting, tweaking, processing, disguising and augmenting his sound so that even when a conventional blues lick or power chord emerges, you could be forgiven for thinking, ‘This is not a guitar.’” Here the sources of sound are even more obscure; long wavery tones unfurl, scattered, sometimes, with plinks of piano or oddly tuned staccato guitar.  

“Russian Tea Room” is the album’s long centerpiece, unrolling in repeated waves, timeless, edgeless, serene with bits of discordant piano studding its ripple-less surface. We are not sure what it has to do with the NYC dining institution, Russia or tea, or indeed how it relates to the world as we know it. The artists have abstracted sound to the point of a celestial hum, beautiful but austere and lacking in real-world signifiers.

“SUBLIMATION o” winds a long organ dirge around skittery runs of what sounds like guitar, the wheezing foundation static while the play of notes churns up agitation on the surface. Flurries of staccato notes run in unexpected directions, stuttering up in question marks, bumping downward in reply. The guitar (or possibly piano or maybe even malleted percussion) sounds very improvised, incorporating half-steps and splats of conflicting notes, but the overall effect is poised and premediated.

These are long tracks that drone on without much incident. Nothing like a traditional melody emerges, and often you don’t even get much sense of a time signature. They are, instead, like the photos that come back from the Hubble Telescope, vast, mysterious, unconcerned with our scrubby human lives but animated by a spiritual presence. Kepler would be proud.

Poss has titled this album Drones, Songs, and Fairy Dust, and indeed, it includes all of the above. Though some tracks favor one element or the other, the lines are not always so sharply delineated. There are drones in the more structured songs, and often, the lilt of melody in even the abstract instrumentals. (I’ll leave discerning “fairy dust” to others.)

Listen, for instance, to the way “Skibbereen Drive” blasts out distorted guitar chords, then surrounds them in flickering wah tones, all the while maintaining a steady, anthemic march. Or how “Out of the Fairy Dust” floats a lucid melody over seething, shifting beds of timber, a folk song living in an ambient wash. “Skew Forest” is maybe the purest expression of feedback sculpture, but even this track follows a wandering narrative line. Poss is thinking hard about texture and atmosphere but not to the exclusion of a good hook.

In the same way, the song-like tracks coruscate with detuned blare, the wall of guitar distortion almost, but not quite, burying the vocals in “Secrets, Chapter and Verse.” “It’s Always Further Than It Seems” has the rough romanticism of post-punk turning into college rock—first run Burma and very early R.E.M. come to mind—but there’s a haze and roar even in this well-shaped song.

As an album, Songs, Drones and Fairy Dust runs a bit long, piling up the brief experiments and longer compositions as Poss tries out new things. You might not want to listen all the way through very often (or you might) but pick any point on this extensive collection and you’ll find some very compelling guitar sounds, bending subtly or overtly towards song.