Mark Anderson & Anthony Guerra - Earth Diffusion CD

Earth Diffusion presents a new set of duo recordings from longtime buddies and bandmates Mark Anderson and Anthony Guerra. Familiarity with their other shared projects—the blurred guitar spew of Mysteries of Love or the thumping no wave of 番長Taste—doesn’t really prepare a listener for the wild, searching, sometimes fragile music present across these thirteen tracks. Instruments, electronics, voices and sounds foraged from the pair’s everyday surrounds come together in unexpected conjunctions and dreamlike chance meetings. The dedication to genuine exploration of the oddities of lo-fi sonics that distinguishes Anderson’s work in Greymouth is a strong presence, with that distinctive fizz of amped-up smartphone recordings sitting alongside analogue murk and the occasional sunburst of percussive clarity. Guerra’s background in austere electroacoustic improv can still be glimpsed in the extreme frequencies, static textures and unsettling dynamic movement here, but any highbrow fussiness has been long left behind in favour of an oozing sonic slime as likely to occasion stunned hilarity as meditative contemplation.

It might be the two-to-four minute track lengths, the occasional appearance of strummed guitar and buzzing organ or the presence of Anderson’s vocals, but the thirteen tracks of Earth Diffusion somehow come across as ‘songs’. They connect to a tradition of studio exploration where rock music is twisted, erased and fragmented into strange new shapes: think Milk From Cheltenham, Dome, LAFMS, or late Shadow Ring. Anderson’s vocal contributions, ranging across incompressible mumbling, lonely Jandek-esque warbling, guttural howls and wheezing sound poetry, possess an unhinged energy that takes everything just that bit further ‘out’. If the idea of Ferrari’s Music Promenade bypassing the marching bands to take a tour of the outer limits of the Xpressway and Alga Marghen catalogues sounds too good to be true, look no further than Earth Diffusion. - Francis Plagne