#tarentel

Arc of Day by Danny Paul Grody

Danny Paul Grody got his start in Tarentel and the Drift, both abstract post-rock bands out of San Francisco who leaned towards the quieter end of the guitar rock experiment. Just over a decade ago, he ventured out on his own in The Fountain, a gorgeous, mostly solo guitar album that found serenity in repeated picked patterns and subtle threads of melody. Since then, he’s made a half dozen albums under his own name, showcasing a self-taught facility with finger-picked styles and an expansive open-minded outlook that seeks the boundaries of blues, jazz, folk and drone.

Tarentel - Fear of Bridges

Three Lobed Recordings

Ghetto Beats... is two and a half hours long. It can easily fit into the genres of noise, prog, ambient, and post-rock. I want to focus on the percussion.

The band's drummer takes a very interesting approach, where the drums typically do not create a beat or a time signature for the rest of the instrumentation, but rather add one more layer to the cacophony of these songs. And as a drummer's job is generally to bang out the same rhythm line after line, it is worth noticing, particularly without the accompaniment matching his beat, that every repetition has some kind of variation, sometimes clearly intentional and other times through imperfect execution, and yet both of these only ever add to the experience.

Yet despite the percussion being a standout performance, the album itself does not even feature percussion for half of its duration! In fact, on the second disc, after the first song, we get an entire contiguous 42 minutes and 38 seconds of music with no drums whatsoever. It is not until 11 minutes 17 seconds into the song "Somebody Fucks With Everybody" that the drums finally kick back in. I utterly love the confident audacity of this choice.