Four with Anthony Guerra

Inge Olmheim/Anthony Guerra
Document
08

Imagine you’re on a rooftop during a very hot, sunny afternoon. There’s a long, thin wire stretched from a post on your building, extending out to another. Enough current is coursing through the wire to generate sympathetic vibrations in it, causing it to emit ultra-high frequency tones on top of whatever inaudible information it might be carrying. In fact, there’s an overabundance of power in the lines resulting in visible, sizzling showers of sparks being extruded at various points, sometimes threatening the welfare of the local flying insect population.

You observe and listen for about an hour. It’s an hour well spent.

Anthony Guerra/Matthew Nidek
Brand New Love
Black Petal
#7

Guerra in wistful, Loren Connors slide mode, letting drop notes soaked in thoughtful melancholy on this single track, 18-minute disc, accompanied by Nidek’s drums. These latter have a similar feel insofar as the percussive thuds and bands seem as though tossed from the ceiling to land where they may. In this case, though they’re effective enough on their own, I’d have preferred to hear Guerra solo, musing alone. As with all Black Petal releases, it’s unusually and attractively packaged, here arriving in a dark brown envelope with hand-painted, day-glo green swatches.

Anthony Guerra/Matthew Nidek
White Eagle
Foxglove
140

Recorded shortly after the above (early 2005), the duo is in a similar space, though occasionally Guerra here lights out for Frippertronics territory. Nidek blends in much more seamlessly on these tracks, finding drums tones that interweave between Guerra’s plaints. When he sets up a furious rustle underneath the soaring conclusion to the first piece, “Sky Mountain”, it’s some thrilling stuff. “As” is much more akin to the previous disc, though the clattering drums somehow sound more appropriate while “Pascua Lama” refers back to the more astringent music found in the Document release (effectively so). The duo reaches a kind slide-apotheosis in the title cut which closes the recording. The melody is just that much more plangent, the percussion that much more on point—it almost gets Hawaiian in its lush lassitude save for the prickles percolating in the cracks, warping the weft.

Vodka Sparrows
Death a Thousand Times Over
Black Petal
#9

Arriving in a black washi paper sheathing tied up in a thick, soft black cord, this release positively breathes sensuous mystery. Vodka Sparrows are Guerra and fellow guitarist Mark Leacy, the two lengthy pieces here recorded in September of 2005. While still retaining the morose melodicism of his work with Nidek, this edges several steps toward the abstract, if not as severely so as the disc with Olmheim. A serene hum is maintained though not without a biting quality, an acidity that nicely corrupts any incipient gloss. The second track especially has a moody, dissipative feel, kind of a deflationary expulsion of a day’s (or year’s) build up of emotions, allowing them to waft out into the ether. They describe it as “late night come down heaviness for drinkers close to gone.” Close enough!

Guerra’s been part of some of the most enjoyable music I’ve heard for the last few years. Each of these discs is well worth a listen if you can locate them. Forced to choose, I’d opt for the duo with Olmheim simply because I find Guerra’s latent lyricism works best when hidden away a bit; it’s always there anyway and often makes for a fascinating, difficult-to-discern element in otherwise more abrasive material. On the other hand, my favorite single moment here might be the cut “White Eagle” which is Guerra at his most overtly melodic. Good stuff all around though.

black petal
foxglove