Joe Musgrove - Patterns of Abundance CD

"I have no patience for the touchless reverence too often afforded field recordings these days, so it's some salve for my salted heart to hear the babbling-brook sounds in the first few seconds get so quickly refracted through a little bit of that banked electronic fuckery. What a relief. This doesn't feel as openly cinematic as Special Problems; instead, like an endless chessy rearranging of vivid little items on a table, steadily solidifying in wide, fiber-optic weave. There's a certain oiliness, too, though--as bright as it may get, everything here sounds like it might be trying to fool you. Pictures of parrots cut out of magazines, already curling at the edges. The flow is thick and beautiful, but also deeply insinuating: you want it to become music, but it wants to become your pulse. After a while, the persistent knuckle-click and dry chrysalis jitter give me faint body-horror quease--"Never enough rain" is kind of a terror--but that's only in moments. Mostly it's absorbing and muffled sylvan pachinko, shuffling one's very ideas of "inside" and "outside." The rolling and duning desert stretches of the latter sections have the warm, pitted glisten of a future that's okay with letting you see it getting dressed. "Cricketscricketscrickets" feels like the whole album in miniature, a neatly teeming core sample of water-tree-city-MIDI-country-sky that you could carry with you inside a tennis-ball can. There's definitely some death and taxes gnawing at the lower frequencies of this record, but when played out loud, it's surprisingly percolating and optimistic. When I put it on, kids ask me about it. For my part, as uninterrupted sittings slip further into unpossibility, and as a steaming Chicago reaches its sausage fingers toward this shit season of wasp-on-fruit, every time I get as far as the dark and lovely cresting cosmic sweeps around the five-minute mark of "Appalling applause," it feels for a little while like I might make it under the umbrella after all.

TLDR: Yellow Big Head Magic Orchestra. Recommended."
James, Chicago.

Heavily indebted to the longform ambient music of the early 90's, especially the work of Tetsu Inoue and Paul Schutze, and designed to be heard in one uninterrupted sitting - if you can find the time.

Dedicated to Sean Baxter (RIP) and Annalea Koernig.