A Shaw Deal

アニマル・コレクティブのメンバーであるGEOLOGIST(BRIAN WEITZ)が、HIGHLIFEとしても知られる親交の深いギタリストDOUG SHAWのギタープレイを解体し、構築し直したエクスペリメンタルの極限領域と呼び切れるであろう傑作アルバム『A SHAW DEAL』がDRAG CITY より待望のリリース!

DOUG SHAWの素晴らしく魔法のような雰囲気を特徴とするフォークギターの楽曲に、GEOLOGIST自身が様々なループや編集を加えることで誕生した色濃い実験精神に溢れる全く新しい未知の楽曲は、フォークギターの音色からは到底想像も付かないであろう斬新な音で全体が構築されており、聴けば聞くほど新たな発見があることは間違い無いでしょう。

As a core member of Animal Collective, Geologist (aka Brian Weitz) often works a tangle of electronics and sampling devices to add chaos to the band’s compositional rock songs. That chaos reigns on A Shaw Deal. The album is ostensibly a collaboration between Geologist and Gang Gang Dance/White Magic contributor “Sleepy” Doug Shaw, but it could also qualify as a remix or an involved edit. The seven songs here were created by Geologist processing, looping, and otherwise reconfiguring a few short video clips of Shaw playing guitar. A final, unlisted track on the album collects the original audio from this source material. The videos were rough and un-produced, and Geologist’s chain of modular synth units and other production effects transform the barebones guitar sketches into a wall of inorganic, often menacing sounds. Beginning with the opening piece “Route 9 Falls,” the sounds of A Shaw Deal are barely recognizable as guitar. Different layers of loops operate as bassline, chord progression, and padding -- all flutter around like a flock of excitable birds. Some of the track’s hypnotic repetition is familiar from Geologist’s ambient sounds in Animal Collective. “Wit of the Watermen” is more drony, with intermittent bursts of noise. Shaw’s guitar fragments are pitch-shifted up and down, and doused in short delay. There are moments that come closer to structured, as with the four-on-the-floor beat of “Knuckles to Nostrils” or the ping-ponging echo clusters and distant silhouettes of melody on “Loose Gravel.” Other tracks are all spacy atmosphere, and some are piles of disorganized clatter, like the haunted music box nightmare stretches that turn up on “Petticoat.” A Shaw Deal is more experimental than musical, with some rare pretty passages or song-like tracks doing battle with the untamed segments. Animal Collective completists will be able to zero in on what makes Geologist’s language of samples and deconstructed loops unique, but to the untrained ear, it might register mostly as broken music begging to be pieced back together. ~ Fred Thomas