Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT offers a sequence of works for player piano, a device which captured Rick Myers’ imagination in 2017. Divining a method from mathematical measurements and intuitive drawing systems, Myers obstructed piano rolls using adhesive tape. Performed in this altered state on a player piano in the hallway of Easthampton Machine and Tool in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the music embedded in the rolls was extricated from its history and given fresh life. Restriction forged a pathway to expanse. Here are the enchanting results.The workings of the machine are evident throughout, wistfully recalling music box fantasias, even as the tumbling notes confound expectations. The meticulously constructed scenarios invariably run amok, and in between chaos and melody, frustration and freedom, an impossible helix fashions its own celestial music. The sounds grumble against one another, summoning subterranean promises and unearthing unexpected delights.As the tracks run into one another, Myers interposes spoken dispatches, detailing aspects of the story behind the record. Like the sounds of the piano, they transcend mere reportage. Increasingly obscured over the course of the two sides, these ghostly interjections are part of the sonic fabric, enhancing both the narrative and acousmatic aspects of the project.Rick Myers is an artist whose decades-long career has studiously disregarded the confines of medium – there are books, drawings, sculptures, installations, exhibitions, videos, performances, design projects, texts, and combinations thereof. Sound, as evidenced by his recent focus on recorded material, is but another potent arrow in his quiver. Plus, it’s nothing new – he cut his teeth as a DJ.This record is an interior travelogue shot through with ecstatic truth. In furthering the process of obstruction by which the player piano makes its music possible, Myers is, in his own words, looking to “cast and dislodge time.” Like God or Loss or Love, Time is one of the bedeviling bottomless wells from which the most affecting art springs. This is the real thing.Rick Myers is not in search of lost time, he is attempting to lose it, and in so doing to chart the inevitable trajectory of that loss, of its apparent disappearance, its peculiar habit of hiding in plain sight.

"The first time I heard Wheatie’s music was at a basement show in Philadelphia, and I was entranced. I’ve felt similarly when watching videos of the French singer Barbara as she concentrates on a corner of the room, her eyes big warm coins, singing “La solitude” about a loneliness that “rolls around the hips” and demands that the door is opened. It’s Barbara’s self-possession that haunts me, her willingness to do publicly what I can only find alone. It’s not so much sound but a spirit that Barbara and Wheatie share: Both make music that is as gorgeous as it’s eerie and says a good deal about the workings of their own minds—and by that, I don’t mean that they reveal their psychology—but they take us deep into their peculiarities as musicians.After Wheatie’s set, I asked where I could get a record, and assumed there must be one—surely, I’m late here—because I wasn’t alone. Everyone at that show was visibly mesmerized. It’s been a few years since then, but I haven’t forgotten it, couldn’t, and have waited for Wheatie’s debut, Old Glow, which captures and renews the hypnotic mystery of her set that night. For Old Glow, Wheatie has collaborated with Stephen Santillan, who plays keyboard and guitar, while she’s on the keyboard and dulcimer, and of course, her distinct vocals.Wheatie and Santillan’s album includes “Blue,” which feels like a lyrical invocation that I can imagine under a canticle’s heightened rubric, requiring the congregation to stand as it’s being sung. This song also establishes the harmonium dream-weaving, and a natural pull toward minor scales, which will take us through most of the album—a sound that can be gloomy, but Wheatie’s voice is a luminescent top coat. It comes to us from a long time ago, a voice used for medieval incantations, traditional ballads, and ancient and supernatural myths about solitude, played through the drainpipe.Old Glow contains a private, condensed language that can only be built by solitude and a willingness to forego readymade forms. The problem with language is that, in order to speak, write lyrics, write about them, you must translate the peculiarity of the self into material script. When the heart is inarticulate. When literary language is often too precise. We’re too trained up in it. There is a version of this kind of music that goes the route of slick pop, or becomes lazy because it's beautiful, but Wheatie’s music is distinguished by an elemental weirdness, a plaintive and wonky carnival way off in the distance—this is what it sounds like to submit the self to itself. On the track “Low,” she ululates, “It’s OK to be low. It’s OK to be low.” And because Wheatie has an uncanny ability to make something strange out of the familiar, it feels like a singular utterance. I have not heard it before. As if an old well could talk.There are also several moments of spontaneity in Old Glow. “Canyon” brings more rock, and the harmonium gets country in “Rose.” These turns make the album feel complex, like an epic about connection, loss, the inevitability of our being alone. Nico’s nightmarish Desertshore also moves along a similar queasy spiral—its emotional locus is precise, even though the music is impenetrable. Death and despair in Desertshore, like solitude in Old Glow, is palpable. They can’t help but continuously return to it.One of this album’s many strengths, to my mind, is its willingness to find a language, a mode, and not interfere with it too much. These songs are built by slow accretion. They’re purposeful. I think of a ceaseless fabric, reminiscent of Wilburn Burchette’s Psychic Meditation Music—listening to this music can render you gummy, stir you into putty, spackle you in the cracks. It would be a mistake to believe that it is simple because it seems as if it could go on forever."--- Chelsea Hogue Ohlman IL 2022

"We have all been there at some point or another, maybe even last night. There are those moments when you are drifting into or out of sleep when it is hard to identify exactly what is real and what is imaginary. Time spent working through the hazy gauze separating waking and dreaming blurs the edges of perception and leaves us sorting through myriad versions of hyper-reality. The music of Body/Head has always existed for me within this liminal space. Whether it is Kim Gordon’s spectral, invocation-like vocals and churning guitar work or Bill Nace’s reality altering guitar conjurings, the duo have spent over a decade creating a singular body of work that rides that very knife’s edge. Are their sonic constructions here to help you or to harm you? To guide you to safety or to lead you into ruin? Where the listener sits mentally at any given moment helps determines the outcome along countless dualities. This mastery over unpredictability is why I have constantly considered them the most potent band going.While time the past few years has been strange in all walks of day-to-day reality, Body/Head continues forwards as a force as constant as the tides. They offer forth the Come On EP now as a sort of proof of life photo, a transmission to remind you that they are still out here and ready to serve on a moment’s notice. Its four tracks have been assembled from a combination of old and new parts to create a composite whole that is every bit as vital as any other chapter within their discography. Equal parts raw and shine, current statement and hint of future releases to come, Come On is Body/Head operating on all cylinders. The concept was to create a statement along the lines of classic 2x7” EPs like Chain Gang’s Deuce Package or Dynasty’s Gate and to that end Come On delivers in full." --- Kim Gordon--Vocals, Electric Guitar, SynthBill Nace----Electric Guitar, Piano, EchoplexEngineered by Seth Manchester and Vice CoolerAdditional home recording by Kim GordonMixed and Produced by Bill Nace and Seth ManchesterOM78/TLR147(Released as a Double 7inchSplit release between Open Mouth Records and Three Lobed Records)

Originally released as a cassette on Open Mouth OM81All sounds Dan Greenwood/Bill Nace

"I have known Matt since the very early 00’s when he was still a student at Hampshire College. We became great friends right away and have remained so since. Matt has been an on-and-off member of IFCO (full time now), and we have worked together on a number of other projects. This is to say, I might be a little biased. (But everyone is biased, no matter how much they write in the third person.) Matt has been doing solo tape music for well over ten years now. My memory says it started out as a live thing with a mixing desk and a bunch of cheap cassette machines. (My memory says a lot of things.) I’m not sure exactly what he does now, but it is something similar and still involves cassette tapes. There are loads of people doing music with field recordings and tapes, etc., and, for the most part, the music is a messy yawn-fest. That is not The Krefting Way. Each of the six pieces on Finer Points has a limited number of elements that slowly revolve. Each track is discrete in its sound pallet but made in a similar fashion. The overall effect is like the bottles in a Joseph Cornell box. My favorite bottle is the one for a guitar (Spanish?) It manages to hit a sweet spot between hypnotic and unsettling. The whole LP is great and expertly sequenced. (The lost art of recording!) Matt’s releases are like desert flowers that bloom and are gorgeous, then they are gone. A tip of the glass to Bill Nace as well. He has kept Open Mouth running for quite a while, and as anyone who has ever run a small label will tell you, ‘It’s a fool’s errand.’ It is, too – but if it weren’t for fools like Bill, the world would be missing a lot of great music." - Scott Foust

Originally released as a cassette in an edition of 100 for east coast gigs in MarchRecorded by Dustin BurrowsMastered by Jake MeginskyAll music by Full Size

Out in the world, in conversation, Samara Lubelski and Bill Nace are always listening. Samara is steadily attentive, she teases out, she leans forward, tunes in, one ear simultaneously alert to the record playing in the background, or the strange sound the dryer is making. Bill, a natural riffer, is wilder: his attention scatters, he gathers sensory information and loops back to deliver a newly synthesized slice of environment.These ways of being show up in their individual work. As a duo the natural push and pull--the hearing and response--deepens and twists until it's difficult to tell where one instrument ends and the other begins. Samara, on violin, unfurls infinite seismometer-esque threads of sound; Bill goes wider, wraps around, envelops and expands.Improvisation, generally speaking, can become a quest for dominance: A wrestling match, or worse, a shouting match. While technically improvised, Bill and Samara seem to be doing something else. They share a language, developed over many years of playing together. As Samara puts it, “having a shared vision that you're able to try and get [to] is way more exciting than actual improv.”One might hear 43/80 as a sequel or sibling or mirror to the duo’s previous studio recording, a self-titled release from 2018. Each record creates an environ for the listener, but where S/T lulls and haunts, the drone of 43/80 swarms. It’s heavier and closer (side one is, anyway), it’s rock ‘n’ roll performed by hypnotists. Bill plays a hollow two-stringed taishogoto, a bassier, more resonant instrument than the solid-bodied, more high-pitched taisho he’s been touring and recording with in recent years.With Bill switching to electric guitar, side two is the more obvious heir to S/T, spacious, rife with gorgeous, crystalline tone, propelled forward by a gentle tension. Samara notes that Bill tosses her curveballs, which she doesn't mind swinging for. “Whatever Bill brings I’m down for it.” Bill says he doesn't really play with anyone like he does with Samara. “There’s a generosity there,” a willingness to meet the other half way. Listening in action opens up possibilities. “I don’t feel like the parameters are firm,” Samara continues. “They’re very open.”---Margaret Welsh NYC 2024  --- Samara Lubelski--ViolinBill Nace---2 String Taishogoto, Electric Guitar Recorded at Machines with Magnets by Seth ManchesterMastered by Chuck JohnsonFront Cover Photo Barry DeanText and Layout Bill NaceBack Cover art Spencer Herbst Split release between Open Mouth Records and Three Lobed Records

"Below a shuffling cabasa-like rhythm, a pair of taut drum patterns is punctuated by swirling electronic crackle and a deep bass drop. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, layers of spongy beats accumulate until they’re wiped out dub-style by an echoing sonar moan that suspends the track in a dark and undulating aquatic reverie, a lull broken by jittery bass tones and reverberant knocks that surge into an intricate percussive maelstrom. Jake Meginsky’s music is distinctly low end and percussive. While nodding to minimal house, dub, and noise, Meginsky’s electronica bears ample evidence of his apprenticeship with fiery avant-jazz percussionist Milford Graves and his training in West African djun djun and djembe. There’s nothing rigid or mechanical here. On the contrary, Meginsky’s rhythmic sensibility is supple and flexible – rumbling, fluttering, and bouncing in elastic configurations of enchanting complexity. All rhythm and squall, the pieces on Vandals can’t be called “songs”; but they’re too non-linear to be called “tracks” and too structurally unpredictable to be “compositions.” Rather, Meginsky builds little electronic ecosystems that seem to breed sounds in all their timbral and textural diversity, and to observe what results as they ally and skirmish with one another." - Christoph Cox --- Jake Meginsky / electronics --- Recorded April 2015 . Additional mixing at sonelab by Justin Pizzoferrato. Mastered by Carl Saff.

"Gorgeously psychedelic debut by this new guitar/violin duo, created by two of the form's great maestros. Samara Lubelski and Bill Nace are both veterans of the American sub-underground. Between them they have many projects under many names on many labels. Most recently, however, the two have been focused on string-based duo aktion, Samara in cahoots with Marcia Bassett, and Bill with Kim Gordon in Body/Head. These two ensembles explore different expanses of the genre. The Lubelski/Bassett Duo focus on the powerful beauty of drone rainbow landscapes, while Body/Head venture into dialogues dealing with subconscious dream language. On this album Bill and Samara create a hybrid between these approaches, offering textual interactions that blaze like fire. On the five tracks of their eponymous LP, Samara's violin creates a base of long form string distention, against which Bill's amp-shudder creates event surges that fill your brain with frozen images of walls caught in mid-collapse, and continents sinking into a sea. Their motion has tectonic implications. About all I can compare it to is momentary flashes of A Handful of Dust (the Bruce Russell/Alastair Galbraith unit), but the intent here seems quite different, and as mentioned before, the results feel bracingly psychedelic. Have not had a chance to spin this after an acid drop yet. Will wait for the actual LP to do that, but I'm thinking it will make for a most excellent pairing. I suggest you consider the same. Tout de suite." - Byron Coley --- Samara Lubelski / violin Bill Nace / guitar --- Cover art Spencer HerbstScreened on Stoughton Tip On Covers by Alan Sherry

First in Open Mouths Solo Guitar Series. Excellent debut solo from Sightings guitarist Mark Morgan.  "The thing is though is that Mark has always had this really great guitar sound, only partly courtesy of all those shitty pedals he insists on using. He's not coming at this from a Pharoah Sanders-worshipping, free jazz-loving, sensibility. Rather, I hear his home town, Detroit. The record is scuzzy, and raw-sounding, punctuated with moments of utter desolation. Moments build, only to collapse again. There are even funky grooves but, of course, they fall apart. It's fucking great. Dude, you should check it out!' - Julie Cafritz, August 2018" "It's probably the best solo ‘noise’ guitar album I've heard since Alan Licht's 2013 masterpiece Four Years Older(IMO, of course). And yet to call this noise guitar feels like a bit of a misrepresentation as it implies (at least technically I suppose it does) a certain underlying haphazardness. That definitely doesn't feel like the base force at work here. While harshness undeniably plays a big part in the proceedings, this is an infinitely listenable record for fans of inventive textures, extreme processing, and dark industrial implications." - Free Jazz Collective --- 1. Jinx Hack - 4:54 2. Gentleman's C - 4:103. Supercomplication - 10:554. Doctor Detroit - 10:125. A Guy Named Reggae - 2:246. Mikki - 4:22

X04 is Nace, Jake Meginsky, and John Truscinski. Their third LP, after previous releases on Ultra Eczema, Ecstatic Peace, Joshua Burketts Spirit of Orr, etc.  --- Bill Nace / guitar Jake Meginsky / electronics John Truscinski / drums --- Recorded in July, 2008 VT.

The trio of Chris Corsano (drums), Okkyung Lee (cello) and Bill Nace (guitar) performing live at John Zorn's NYC improv club The Stone in 2014, three free improvising titans of the modern age in a very limited LP "An improvisation whose meshes, inextricable, allow larsens or repetitions to consider no solo. In any case, their network would always be more impressive in its solidity and coherence." - grisli --- Tracklisting: 1. 17:43 2. 15:02

Another sold out number from Nace, this time with Chris Corsano and Susan Alcorn - a fantastic pedal steel player who has collaborated with the likes of Mary Halvorson, Pauline Oliveros, Evan Parker and pianist Sylvie Courvoisier.  --- Susan Alcorn / pedal steel Chris Corsano / drums Bill Nace / guitar --- Recorded September 5. 2018 live at Rotunda Philadelphia, PA.

"At last! The long-promised duo LP by two undisputed masters of post-tongue instrumental gesticulation and invention. Augured by their eponymous 7” from 2019, Off Motion is a full-length exploration of the previously unknown aural destinations these two guys continually discover as they move beyond the borders of music-as-it-is-played. Often, when writing about music, it's possible to draw comparisons to players' stylistic relationships to what has gone before. But the music on Off Motion (to quote a William Burroughs chestnut), “buggers comparison.” Nace's style on electric guitar may have its roots somewhere in the playing of Keith Rowe, but the sonic scapes he conjures are so nimbly freaked, I can rarely figure out what the hell he is doing (if anything) to generate what I'm hearing. And White's avant garde approach to the jaw harp (as well, I think, nose flute and maybe even bird call) has so few precedents apart from random Fluxus events, it's impossible to make any inferences as to possible influences. This duo lives up to the promise of ESP-Disk's motto as much as anyone I can think of. You have never heard such sounds in your life. The seven pieces on Off Motion are hard to unravel. Chik sent recordings to Bill. Nace added his own bits. Then he and Emily Robb screwed around with everything until it pulsed with sheer mystery. I took a lot of notes on the tracks, but the best ones are hard for even me to decode. For “Pathways” -- starts with pixie twinkle guitar, then evolves into a duet for Taishōgoto and nose flute that sounds as though it was designed to drive dogs nuts while they search for phantom, mocking squirrels. For “Erasing” -- like a troubled pigeon visiting a guy who uses an electric razor while bouncing around on Slinky-shoes, before switching into carillon-based boots and breaking into a human pinball routine he's been practicing since he was a boy. I repeat these descriptions only to show how entirely Bill & Chik's music resists easy categorization. There is a sense at times the studio/mixing board itself is being used as an instrument, which is very cool. But I am still jonesing to see these guys do some live shows. Both Bill and Chik have the ability to mix jocularity and seriousness into a strangely compelling whole. Their music is bizarre as hell without being off-putting or sterile, and anyone who has a taste for weird thrills is gonna love Off Motion to death. Tell Alice Cooper the news." -- Byron Coley

Two tracks from the No, The Sun sessionsRecorded at Paranoise Studio Hadley, MA by Jim MatusCover art Paul FlahertyCenter label art and text Bill NaceLayout by Stephanie Sutkowski --- Paul Flaherty / alto saxBill Nace / electric guitar

Daniel Carter / clarinetSamara Lubelski / violinBill Nace / electric guitar ---Recorded by Robert Mizaki at the Glove in Brooklyn NY on 12/6/2017Cover art by Samara LubelskiCovers screened by Alan Sherry

The sound of the violin is a product of tension and release; the hair of the bow pulls back the violin’s string over and over again and, when the tension gets too great, it releases. The resulting vibration disturbs the air around it which travels in waves, exciting our ear drums and becoming sound. This confrontation of energy with air—the alternation of potential and kinetic energy—occurs over and over again in microcosm: catching, holding, tensing, and releasing. As listeners, however, we only perceive glorious sound. If there’s an efficient way of summing up Samara Lubelski, it’s these two words: glorious and sound. But, in a deeper sense, her music also amplifies the micro-process of the sounding process of the violin: the specific joys of tension, release, and every possible gradation between the two. The tension contained in each sound on Partial Infinite Sequence is not disturbing or stressed. That kind of sound is satisfying but too easy. Instead, it feels like that split second after you trip on the sidewalk. Your body could go in any direction, and every outcome is possible. Your pulse quickens. If you were able to freeze that moment in time and live in it the elation of the unknown would be overwhelming. Samara makes that split-second feeling exist for two sides of an LP. And yet, this music also brings comfort. The tense feeling of elation lives distinctly side-by-side with a knowledge that this music is correct and fits that gap in your world that has been carved out exactly for it. It’s satisfying. It’s the feeling after you trip, the moment that you realize you’re safe, and that you found some grace in stumbling. There are few recordings that have struck me as having this particular quality of having this level of profound tension, stasis, and release mixed, but not diluted by linear cause and effect. Ellen Fullman’s The Long String Instrument is one, as is Charles Curtis playing Naldjorlak I. These are special recordings—examples of a sensitive human being coming to a deep understanding of what they want to say with an instrument while exposing that instrument’s essence in sound. It’s a life event to find a record like that, and I’m happy that I’ve found another. Nate Wooley NYC 2020 --- Samara Lubelski - violin --- Bill Nace - cover art Layout - Bill Nace & Rosali Middleman

Solo Guitar 2 was recorded by Bill Nace in 2008, in a good-sounding room in Bennington, Vermont.  This year the record, originally released as a now (nearly) extinct cassette, is reissued without it’s mysterious and (maybe?) long-lost sibling Solo Guitar 1 (Like any good punk demo -- which, both aesthetically and energetically, Solo Guitar 2 is -- the thrill of discovery is made only sweeter by the potential of future discovery).  The vinyl release comes a little less than a year after Bill’s first “official” solo record, BOTH, which was released by Drag City in May, 2020. The two records don’t necessarily stand in opposition, but they are at different points on the spectrum of production, tone, mood, time, place, age, career. Where BOTH is softened by the warmth and precision of a studio, there’s a wildness to Solo Guitar 2 which approaches the experience of witnessing Bill perform live.  Made up of mostly brief pieces -- songs, practically -- Solo Guitar 2 winds tight, then unwinds, or sometimes snaps apart. Crackling, itchy static morphs into heavy, watery vibration, layered on metallic rattle. There are moments where that Bennington room sounds as sterile and lonely as a deserted art gallery. And then it becomes spacious and warm, like a cathedral filling with the hum of the universe.  The bulk of Bill’s releases are collaborations with other artists, who are drawn to him (at least in part) because he’s an innovative player and a deep listener. Those qualities hold, and in certain ways intensify when he’s on his own. As he takes a series of unlikely tools across his prone guitar with the grace and urgency of someone at a loom or an aircraft control panel, there’s a sense of reaching inward. But where some might meander or navel-gaze, Bill’s playing is a process of constant dynamic construction. What unfurls can feel intensely personal, and often -- for reasons I don’t always understand -- very moving. Bill isn’t interested in micromanaging his listeners’ experiences, but he does make room for us.  Composer Pauline Oliveros observed that when we listen deeply to the world around us, we sometimes notice very subtle and quiet differences in sounds that we thought were familiar. As a result, she writes, “the slightest difference may lead you to a new creative relationship.”  Bill is, I think, tuned in to these subtle and quiet differences. But, in a truly punk fashion, he flips this for the listener, making unfamiliar and not-very-subtle noise into something akin to (but also distinct from) familiar sounds: traffic outside your window, the soft roar of a conch shell to your ear, static between radio stations.Solo Guitar 2, full as it is of shades and moods and life, offers a fresh way of hearing.  Margaret Welsh Philadelphia, PA 2021