Improvised music is at its best when it just is, pure expression without pretenses. Necessarily self-funded, this humble approach has sustained itself via open-access internet platforms in recent decades and home-taping/trading long before that. The latter tradition is no relic lost to history, but a stubborn survivor even in a devoutly digital age, and we have it to thank for excellent art like this. When G-Tech operator Seamus Williams (TVE, A[e]yurvedic Tapes) and Mickey O’Hara (whose Bituminous Concrete Curb Detail on Ayurvedic I reviewed here last October) record and/or perform as Lean, they use nebulous junk assemblages that hum, hiss, crackle, and crumble with liquid ease, their considered interactions landing somewhere between Creode and GOD on the homegrown tabletop electronics spectrum. All of the Lean material collected on Sounds, and in fact all of the duo’s work, can be—and are, by Williams himself—described as simply “jams”: low-stakes, open-ended meetings of the minds that are as exploratory as they are expressive. On Sounds, a C60 of new material culled from the past six or so months, it’s pretty much impossible to tell who’s doing what… but that hardly matters with stuff like this. It opens with a bold bout of bass-heavy currents that retreat just as quickly as they arrive, leaving behind a simmer of cracked circuits and brooding drones. Radio plays a prominent role throughout, both as pure static and garbled half-tuned broadcast, always used gently and texturally (instead of disrupting the flow with full-on grabs). These aren’t just jams in terms of mindset, but also with regard to how they pan out: not impatient but not exactly patient either, eager to move and evolve with plenty of attention still paid to a general arc. The lengthy second track ends with a bang, making way for a B side that’s more restrained but no less fun.
Copies are available via email: seamusrwilliams@gmail.com.
Noise Not Music 