Remember hearing music while dreaming, fully confident that you’ll be able to reconstruct it once awake? Music that, as it turns out, you were the sole witness. In retrospect, why ruin the experience by something so vulgar as hearing it a second time, much less having to share it? We don’t mean to alarm you, but David Grubbs and Liam Keenan have returned from the dark side of the pillow bearing Your Music Encountered in a Dream.
How did they do it?
They did it by meeting to record a series of electric guitar duets in Sydney just as summer was turning to fall. They did it because Grubbs was limber and uncharacteristically chill after a couple of weeks in Australia playing shows and not playing shows. Sydney resident Liam Keenan’s comfort zone gravitates toward singing and songwriting under the moniker Meteor Infant, and on this session one genuinely senses an unabashed spirit of discovery. It’s happening, it’s really happening in these three generously scaled improvisations. Maybe The Necks—as well as solo recordings by Tony Buck and Chris Abrahams—count as unconscious reference points. From the juggling and interplay of pitches in isolation, to the ecstatic speaking-together of strings, to guitar music as electronic music, there’s little in the way of searching for endings in this revelatory meeting. No hastening the dream’s end. Hail the first encounter.