Jeff Gburek - Energariums

Jeff Gburek
Energariums
Nurnichtnur

What is it with the Nurnichtnur label and experimental solo guitar releases in metal boxes? It’s as if the raw electricity contained therein were some kind of biohazard needing to be contained in an industrial strength package. Gburek is a tabletop man, a croucher, a peerer through nests of wires, switches, and processing devices. It must be daunting to cross over into the world of the table; one must hesitate at the almost inevitable Keith Rowe comparisons. (Only the brief “Detail” sounds overtly Rowe-like, with its symphony of clangs.) At any rate, this is a guy who certainly doesn’t fetishize the guitar as guitar; after all, he’s officially credited with “electro-acoustic guitar, selected materials, machines, field recordings & voices,” and among those materials are apparently kitchen implements and large pieces of metal. Gburek is also in love with high frequencies throughout his music, which he apparently produces by rewiring his amp circuits so they feed back on themselves independently of the guitar. He also gets some good sounds by placing small motors on the wooden body of his guitar. With nine selections here, several of which are improvised, and a recording time just a few seconds shy of an hour, Gburek is diving headfirst into the music, associations and expectations be damned.

He’s got a good ear for contrast, frequently combining guttural punctuations with theremin-like whines to good effect. He certainly is fond of scraping vigorously on many of these pieces, almost as if he’s trying to unsettle and shake off those lush drones and hums in which he ensconces himself. On a lot of these tracks he’s far busier than a lot of tabletop folks, and instead of relentless focus on a single idea he tends to layer things (so his music has a real thickness, a real heft to it). At times, this leads him into some territories that I didn’t find all that successful. For example, I don’t actually think the agonized vocals on “Oum Kas’r, Mother of All Ports” are very good (there are lots of Eye-like vomit noises and so forth). And I found the improvisations (tracks 6-8) to be somewhat less focused, playing around with some Bailey-like crankiness. But the rest of the music is strong.

The vocabulary will not be radically new, but Gburek’s voice is nonetheless a compelling one. With his ear for the spaced-out and the ethereal, his playing will delight fans of contemporary electroacoustic music; but with his radical preparations and additions to the instrument, you could almost see him as a kind of lab technician, a Harry Partch of the guitar who will eventually reach the limits of what he can do with a guitar and simply build an instrument entirely from scratch. Each one is like a particular angle of vision onto a strange landscape, albeit one with a few familiar properties (or lines which evoke the known). Sounds like radios, bells, drills, and moans may emit, brief effervescences whose traces linger in your memory even as the sounds are reshaping themselves.