Serving the San Francisco Bay Area New Music Community

CD
Artist Diaz-Infante/St.Chaos/Bohol
Title The Long Await Between Collasped Lungs
Label Pax Recordings - PR90257 - http://www.paxrecordings.com
Released On 1/2/2003
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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 … 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. ~ Francois Couture