Diaz-Infante / St. Chaos / Bohol

The Long Await Between Collapsed Lungs

Label: PAX Country: USA

"This is a cozy session of guitar free improvisation, avant folk style. San Francisco artist Ernesto Diaz-Infante meets the Texas-based noisicians Pablo St. Chaos and Bohol for an otherworldly set of guitar trios. Acoustic, electric, and prepared, the instruments are used in various ways, from setting up folkish strumming backgrounds to providing an eerie layer of bottleneck melodies or evoking the ancient koto (a Japanese string instrument). The detuned twangs of the slide guitar (unless it's a tabletop model à la Fred Frith) and the repetitive strumming form a strange alliance. Together they create a mood of experimental psychedelia with touches of alternative folk, lo-fi, shoegazing, or whatever you want to call it (but definitely not post-rock). This impression is reinforced whenever Diaz-Infante breaks into song. His monotone voice is mixed low in "La Cosa Pasada en la Noche" and "Sans Division," sounding completely blissed out. "Still Endless & Drawn Out Toward You" gives the most satisfying moments, despite its extended duration. Here the three guitars really come together, the prepared one bringing strange click-clacks to the sound palette. "Sans Division" is very disquieting, mostly because the slide's infernal racket makes it sound like a tape playing in a faulty deck. The Long Await Between Collasped Lungs [sic] is not an easy listen despite its laid-back tunes. Actually, it becomes highly unsettling exactly because of that.

Since the mid-'90s, Ernesto Diaz-Infante counts as one of the most prolific avant-garde composer and improviser the U.S. West Coast has seen. He has performed and recorded music on piano, prepared guitar, and electronics; composed chamber music; improvised with a very large number of musicians from California, New York, and Chicago; and released a pile of CDs on very small independent labels such as Pax Recordings, Sweetstuff Media, Zzaj Productions, and Public Eyesore. He also curates the Big Sur Experimental Music Festival (since 1999) and the creative music series at the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco (since 2000). His multifaceted career gives him the look of an eclectic or maverick artist, but the persistence and commanding seriousness with which he pursues his career is gaining him a small but dedicated following."-François Couture, All Music