Open Mouth

Heavy experimentation out of Northampton, Massachusetts. Operated by guitarist and graphic artist Bill Nace. 

Long sold out vinyl! "Nace and Dilloway make the perfect duo. For years, they've each kept their music fresh, always avoiding preconceived notions of what they're supposed to do. Dilloway's tape loops and electronics are routinely musical, which Nace's guitar always stretches to the edges of alien electricity. Both exude a refreshing and vehement disregard for cliché without leaving behind the necessity of tradition. One hears the earliest hints of electronic music, the conceptual and visceral assault of noise, the structural and spiritual liberation offered by free jazz, the delicate patience of extended techniques, and so much more." Matt Krefting. --- Bill Nace / electric guitarAaron Dilloway / tape --- Originally released on cassette as Silver Lining #2. Mastered by Carl Saff. "At long last, this recording sees a proper release. There's a story: Initially, I released this as a cassette on my own label, Silver Lining. To be fair, you can hardly call it a label. I have no right releasing my own music, let alone anyone else's. I'm bad at manufacturing things, I'm bad at promoting them, and I'm especially dismal when it comes to packing things up and mailing them out. And so this cassette had a brief brush with public life and then vanished, due primarily to my negligence and laziness. This is where Open Mouth, once again, comes to the rescue. The record comes in a gorgeous full-color sleeve, and the sound is so much finer than the cassette that even the more sweaty-palmed collectors out there will gladly welcome this object in favor of its previous incarnation, and join me in eagerly awaiting the day when these two release a proper full length. I like that they call this EP BAND. It's a subtle melding of the personal and the conceptual. The 'B' from 'Bill,' the 'A' from 'Aaron,' the 'N' from 'Nace,' and the 'D' from 'Dilloway.' It's simple. But they're not really a band. A band is a thing that exists over time and practices and builds its own identity. Or something. This is a duo. A meeting of the minds. A conversation. A lost weekend. At their best, duos illuminate the core tenets of individuals while pushing them into territory they might not otherwise occupy. It sounds easy but it's anything but. Just look at divorce rates. Nace and Dilloway make the perfect duo. For years, they've each kept their music fresh, always avoiding preconceived notions of what they're supposed to do. Dilloway's tape loops and electronics are routinely musical, which Nace's guitar always stretches to the edges of alien electricity. Both exude a refreshing and vehement disregard for cliché without leaving behind the necessity of tradition. One hears the earliest hints of electronic music, the conceptual and visceral assault of noise, the structural and spiritual liberation offered by free jazz, the delicate patience of extended techniques, and so much more. This collaboration though, like their back catalogs, works because it is beholden to none of these. Their individual voices are recognizable, yet the record's allure is found when those voices funnel into one another. In these moments, who's who becomes irrelevant, and the music is elevated to its rightful place, far above the concerns of personality or individualism. The gurgles, scrapes, moans, and loops build their own intoxicating fog, a metallic expanse with its own logic. After all these listens, I remain disoriented by it. It's the kind of thing you want to play again because you can't quite remember exactly what it sounds like. I'm reminded of J.G. Ballard: 'The slower the clock, the nearer it approximated the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time.' And maybe that's the thing. Nace and Dilloway each embrace the immediacy of moments and the endless march of time equally, so for this record to finally see the real light of day is no minor event." (Matt Krefting, Holyoke, MA, 2016)

Band EP – Aaron Dilloway & Bill Nace

Recorded during a trek to the Pacific Northwest, this session is very damaged by the post-tongue explosive devices packed by each of the quartet's members. Skittering along the most devious edge of improvisational madness, Greg Kelley, Greg Campbell, Bill Nace and Mr. Shoup bring four chunks of deep underground moisture into the air for the first time. Let us make to examine them. 'Morning' greets the listener beneath a raucous grackle filled tree, mounting to a commuters' rage. Then along comes a mage with mushrooms, and the growl and rasp spreads out into what one must imagine a stoned rabbit's brain records from a dawn. In 'Separating a door from a window', Mr. Shoup's sax limns the wall of sound into permeable spaces. The horns and percussion throw up bramble hollers of humorous squawk, but in the end, Wally is triumphant. Like smoke snaking over the door, 'Transom' is a very present and seductive piece. If you are a programmer, this is an excellent sound experience to loop, as it is both loving and bossy. Horn and reed lead you into 'Nothing is deprived of its warmth,' and then gleefully pierce your eardrums with needles. Once the path has been cleared to your brain, molten notes are poured in and, like a Dead Head prostrate with his pipe, you become one with the universe. A warm universe. At first I thought it was weird they named this album after the lost book of Tolkien's Silmarillion. Now I'm not so sure." -- Lili Dwight/Byron Coley, Deerfield MA 2015

One End To The Other ‎ – Wally Shoup / Greg Campbell / Greg Kelley / Bill Nace

"Debut LP from Meginsky. Subterranean, nearly-inaudible restraint and a rushing, stuttering throb rule the night on this record. Its electric moods are so resolutely alien they suggest worlds unknown rather than create them. Irregular heartbeat thumps are set against high end atmospheres explored in microscopic detail. Haunting overlays of tones fluctuate and tremble, and not one moment feels forced. The music is meticulously constructed and consistently surprising. The electronics spin away, shooting off into bizarre and unexpected territory, and all the while Meginsky guides them with a benevolent, confident, endlessly fascinating hand. To hear him tell it, the record is 'a document of me looking for the experience I have not yet had, and maybe will never have. This is where the title comes from. The pull of the void.' Natural phenomena, like fog or mist, tend to render the environment and one's ability to see it nearly impossible, and if you tilt your head back like you have a nosebleed there is always the fear that the sun might set sooner. When you stop in a secret place there is no need to talk. These are streets full of sullen languid violence and grey phantoms." -- Matt Krefting Holyoke, MA May 2014 "By its closing track the album is in a state of malfunction, with rhythms splintering and disintegrating, peppered with fizzing tonal clusters and static blasts which sound more like Voice Crack than anything you’d expect to hear on a dancefloor." The Wire "All electronics, almost all smooth and clean sounds chosen, it references beat-driven styles with seemingly regular rhythms, but they're overlaid in non-obvious patterns and use very different textures, resulting in a fine sense of space where the relative absence of grit and inexactitude don't bother me nearly as much as is often the case in work I've heard that's tangentially related" Brian Olewnick --- Jake Meginsky / electronics --- Artwork by Bill Nace. Mastered by Mark Allen Miller. 

L'Appel du Vide – Jake Meginsky

Gates And Variations rounds out a loose trilogy of records by Jake Meginsky for Open Mouth. Not an intended trilogy on Jakes part but it has become one to my mind. It has come to be how I listen to them and experience them, all informing each other, echoing and challenging each other and growing into each other's space and light like a garden of plants that would never actually coexist anywhere in reality. Jake is always tirelessly reaching for something new yet I'd avoid using the word progression here. It instead feels to me like the last piece of a puzzle, or of a world created by some Jack Kirby demigod. Something has been completed and now all the pieces are interchangeable. The first can go last. The middle can be first. The whole thing becoming a universe looping in on itself with a multitude of entry points and not a lot of exits. These are dense environments where sections can move from microscopic to macroscopic, day to night and back again, so effortlessly that it's hard to tell if it's intended or if something imperceptible within you shifted the locus of your perception. But it is all very intentional, something carefully carved to give the feeling of something, though unfamiliar and strange, organic and grown. There's a sense of danger here like warning transmissions, concussive roiling rhythms and jagged disturbances. Yet also clear straight lines giving way to enveloping curve and staggering beauty. Supplant the beginning with the end with the beginning." --Bill Nace, Philadelphia, PA, September 2017.

Gates & Variations – Jake Meginsky