Whistle From Above

ガスター・デル・ソル手法に原点回帰!? 冬景色エクスペリメンタルなソロ最新作!

心に染み渡るフォークを奏でたと思えば、難解でフィーリング重視の即興演奏も行ったりと、ソロの形で色々な姿に変身するUSインディ根幹デイヴィッド・グラブス。最新作『WHISTLE FROM ABOVE』はデイヴィッドの活動に必要不可欠なメンバーと即興演奏で編み上げた重厚盤!

本作の制作をしている時、自身が所属するガスター・デル・ソルの未発表曲&ライブ音源を纏めた2024年リリース『WE HAVE DOZENS OF TITLES 』の編集も同時進行で進めており、自然とガスター・デル・ソルの手法に回帰。アヴァンギャルドでストイックなアプローチと冬景色を想起させる冷たいアレンジは、デイヴィッドが再び予測不能で本能のままに音をぶち撒けるやり方を始めたようで胸が高鳴る!

ジム・オルークと共に「ポスト・ロック」という時代を作り上げた男のセンス、とくとご覧あれ!

Experimental composer, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist David Grubbs has been an enigmatic musical force for as long as hes been making music, imbuing even his teenage punk bands with an abstract strangeness, and deepening that character with everything hes done since. While Grubbs Gastr del Sol project in the 1990s was an outlet for perhaps his most accessible work, concurrent with that band Grubbs was exploring even harder to digest material in his solo output. Whistle from Above is another entry in his ongoing solo catalog, a body of work thats found him refining a personal sound language thats reserved, achy, curious, and always just a tiny bit mischievous, this time opening up his flowy, unearthed pieces to input from a host of collaborators. After a gentle preamble of tentative electric guitar and ghostly strings on the titular track, Grubbs ventures into full-ensemble group playing on "The Snake on Its Tail," with free-flowing drums and percussion from Andrea Belfi, trumpet from Nate Wooley, and a swarm of dissonance in the form of distorted electro-acoustic tones from Nikos Veliotis. "Hung in the Sky of the Mind" focuses on interplay between Grubbs minimal piano figures and Rhodri Davies harp, "Poem Arrives Distorted" is an uncomfortable push-pull between cello and fingerpicked guitar, and "Queens Side Eye" blooms slowly from rural electric guitar ruminations into a swell of ambient drones and conversational trumpet. Grubbs also explores less organic instrumentation with the noisy textures of "Synchro Fade Pluck Stutter Slip" and with the musique concrete-styled fragments of tape sounds, raw electronics, and scattered acoustic instruments on "Later in the Tapestry Room." Whistle from Above is a collection of tense, pensive pieces that only occasionally show glimmers of resolution. Its abrupt stops, incomplete statements, and uneasy clashes of familiar-feeling sounds and alienating noise are all elemental to Grubbs compositional vocabulary, and the album is another chapter of mystifying and slightly unnerving music that could be made by no one else. ~ Fred Thomas