Poole, Rod / Sasha Bogdanowitsch - Mind’s Island CD (Mega Blowout Sale)
SKU
JustGuitar 01
Rod Poole was a experimental guitarist, mostly working with a acoustic Martin guitar, refretted with just-intonation frets.
Originally from the UK, he performed with Derek Bailey as well as in private collaborations with Keith Rowe of AMM.
After moving to the United States in 1989, his studies in just intonation began with instructor, Ervin Wilson.
This is improvised duets in just intonation for guitar and voice and is quite lovely and easy listening for what this is.
“[This] falls under the broad net of the avant garde, but if hearing that phrase conjures up the ghost of Albert Ayler or the electronic poems of Edgard Varese, then this release demonstrates just how wide a net is cast under that label.
In the case of Poole, avant garde more closely reflects his choice of instrument, or, to be precise, how that instrument is tuned, rather than any nontraditional choices in the framing of the music with noise, found instrumentation or other affectations of the modernist movement. Poole chooses to work with Just tuning for his guitar. Simplistically, this means the strings are tuned to be more harmonically sympathetic than what we usually hear in tempered (standard) tuning. These kinds of microtonal differences drive many in the straight music world insane, and anything recorded using this alternative approach is instantly classified as subversive, tagged with a scarlet L (for loony) and forced to live out behind the tool shed, to be visited only by crackpots, intellectuals or your uncle who drank way too much scotch and thought he was listening to his Rusty Warren record.
With that wonkery out of the way, I’ve got to tell you that the music of Mind’s Island is about as far removed from the distorted sonic noise of what most people think of as avant garde as can be imagined. It is actually more akin to something you would pick up off of Peter Gabriel’s Real World label, or hear in a yoga class.
Mind’s Island was recorded direct to digital and is comprised entirely of improvised music, where the two musicians agreed upon a scale as a basis for improvising and, as noted in the press release, the “melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics and duration were spontaneous.” The end result is a collection that, at its best, sounds like Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn singing over Nick Drake’s guitar playing on Pink Moon, as on the opening track Sun Speak.”-Harmonicsdb
- LabelJustGuitar
- UPC687474138226