A Window & A Mirror ［7inch+BOOK］

1996年のデビューから2020年の最期まで、ジョーン・オブ・アークに在籍したのはバンドリーダーのティム・キンセラただひとりだった。四半世紀近く流動的なラインナップを維持してきたのた。本書はジョーン・オブ・アークの最初の5枚のアルバム(ジェイド・ツリー期)のストーリーをアーカイブ写真とティムの日記から抜粋したページで展開し彼の回想とコンパクトな初期の歴史とともに紹介している。ティムがジョーン・オブ・アークの直前に始めたバンドRed Blue Yellowの唯一無二のライヴ録音を7インチで収録。

Chicago band Joan of Arcs habit of confounding listeners and demolishing expectations began the moment they arrived. Formed by Tim Kinsella in 1995 immediately after the breakup of his melodic emo/hardcore group Capn Jazz, Joan of Arc was worlds away from the crashing instrumentation and breathless urgency of his former band. Instead, they were boundlessly experimental, usually drawing from a collection of less aggressive sounds like acoustic instruments and unpolished electronics. The band explored without limits for over 20 years, with no two records sounding all that similar. The box set A Window & A Mirror collects Joan of Arcs first five studio albums, released on the Jade Tree label between 1996 and 2003. Although the bands evolution by no means plateaued with this material, the early years set the tone for sounds theyd extrapolate on for the rest of their career. The first two albums, 1997s A Portable Model Of and 1998s How Memory Works, feel almost like interlocking halves of one piece. In these introductory chapters, the group intersperses full-band blasts of post-rock energy with fragments of ambient electronic experiments and quieter songs that sound almost like chamber pop. The double album Live in Chicago, 1999 (not a live concert recording, but a statement of fact that the bandmembers all resided in Chicago) went deeper in terms of both arrangement and experimentation, taking different directions on different tracks, and bringing in guest musicians to add jazz elements to some songs. 2000s The Gap shattered the bands sound into microscopic pieces, utilizing extreme digital editing and giving the entire album a glitchy presence. 2003s So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness adopts more of a live sound than the studio collage style of some of the earliest albums, reflecting the other side projects Kinsella and crew were active in at the time (such as the visceral throb of Make Believe) without completely abandoning their tendencies to experiment with instrumentation. A Window & A Mirror accomplishes the necessary feat of organizing this early phase of a tirelessly evolving band into a well-defined bracket. Though it barely scratches the surface of all they would do in the years to follow, the limited snapshot of Joan of Arc offered up here is fascinating and wonderfully confounding in and of itself. ~ Fred Thomas