"Veteran guitarist Davey Williams has had a 35-year career as an improviser, best known for his collaborations with string player LaDonna Smith under the name Trans Museq, and his latest solo offering, Antenna Road, is a briskly paced 30-track album that colorfully expounds his off-center guitar language. Although he uses multi-track recording, all sounds were recorded live with no studio processing, using a variety of guitars (electric, acoustic, and steel-body resonator) and even a plugged-in sitar and an electric screwdriver. A few songs are tuneful ditties with a standard rhythm or make a tip of the hat toward genres, like with some slide guitar licks, but mostly the album is wildly capricious, demonstrating a playful curiosity. Expressing a sense of humor in music without using words is typically limited to just a few methods; playing with dynamics and tempos in a volatile way, like Spike Jones or the cartoon-music composer Carl Stalling, or ironic genre mash-ups (say, Led Zeppelin songs in a bluegrass style) are among the most common. Avoiding these techniques, Williams has his own unique kind of musical absurdity conveyed in the sounds themselves, which is more in line, for example, with what the Residents were doing in the '70s. Williams can make an electric guitar sound like it's gargling ("Friendly Synapse Junction") or chuckling ("Hubris"), and on "The Shaman's House," it sounds like he's dragging a wet finger across a guitar to make it whinny, while he beats a guitar's body like a hand drum. The song titles on Antenna Road vividly evoke little stories or various settings, such as "At the Air Show" which apparently tries to recreate the sound of jet engines by running an electric screwdriver placed near electric guitar pickups. "Factory Interior with Pep Song" has a perfect title, combining vaguely industrial noises with a warped approximation of a marching band song, while "Snafu in the Finale" is a jaunty 21-second circus tune. One oddball track is "The Street Is an Empty Knife," which is the only track on which Williams sings, and his vocals have a touch of Captain Beefheart, evoking a kind of beatnik noir. Some may find his fickle approach to be confounding and his style to be inaccessible and possibly deranged, but Antenna Road is a lively, scattered, and unabashedly eccentric album, overflowing with unusual and stimulating sonic moments."-Ernie Paik/Chattanoga Post
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At The Squid's Ear!
Related Categories of Interest:
Improvised Music
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Track Listing:
1. The Crystal 0:41
2. THe Old Railway Tunnel 0:43
3. Aria (for Derek Bailey) 0:54
4. Rope Bridge 0:36
5. Friendly Synapse Junction 1:33
6. Tinpan Walk-up 1:20
7. At the Air Show 1:29
8. The Shaman's House 0:41
9. Factory Interior with Pep Song 1:53
10. Signal Rod 0:35
11. Traveling Bag 0:38
12. Sky with Two Small Clouds 0:23
13. The Lonely Rooster 1:29
14. Follow the Signs 0:40
15. 11 p.m. on the Psych Ward 1:41
16. Shaky Jake 0:59
17. Crossing Shangri-La 2:49
18. Silver Pearl Strut (for Johnny Shines) 1:08
19. The Trance (Version 1) 1:39
20. The Trance (Version 2) 1:39
21. The Street Is an Empty Knife 3:00
22. The Night Sky and the Control Room Behind 1:44
23. Generator Start-up and Test Run (for J.P. Williams) 2:18
24. The Mound 2:13
25. Hubris 4:19
26. Horses (in memory of the filly Eight Belles) 1:50
27. Military Brat Blues 2:40
28. The One That Got Away 2:02
29. Snafu in the Finale 0:22
30. Love, Chakras and Aura (for Neko Linda) 0:40
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