Glen Davis & E. Jason Gibbs - Steam Fence

The Free Jazz Collective 0

By Gregg Miller

Gentle, disorganized chaos. Electro-acoustic + found sounds and live sampling. Vague industrial banging; reverberations of something indecipherable. Birds, static, resonant triangles, hard bowing and plucking The noise is pulsing, and we’re moving about inside it, The landscape adrift. Post-apocalyptic sound-debris laden with twisted imagery and unwonted intrusions. If not outright threatening, then slightly dangerous, like walking barefoot in an abandoned machine-shop. At the close of the second track, a human voice comes through like a ray of light across the illumination of a crevice, and then it ends. Crows provide the outro for track 3. Sounds manifests and then takes flight in organic life.

Sometime the noise-field is claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing. Do you live in the loud part of town? Turn it up. It’ll transfigure the construction noise, traffic, crows, and airplanes into a pleasant backing chorus. The fourth track is gentler, less menacing. Long tones shift and pulse under an assortment of bells and chimes in various registers. Track 5 lets distortion slowly overtake the proceedings, taking us back inside the sonic enclosure.

Track 7 lays down moving planes of casio chords, augmented by Derek Bailey-esque guitar plucks, and possibly a trombone. Less machine-shop industrial, the sound evokes a cleaner, though still artificial environment. What symphony chorus of hums does office furniture enjoy after the humans have gone home? The outro gives us the sound of seashore waves and cricket drones, night falling through an open window. The 8th track is the close miking of something, or many things impossible to discern, but then also altered and looped back in.

In 2021, E. Jason Gibbs released Wolves of Heaven (Orbit 577, 2021) (mastered by Henry Kaiser!), a full-on acoustic affair: a panoply of self-conscious, angular outbursts. Paul Acquaro called it “haunting and unusual,” and the liner notes (Owen Maerks) calls Wolves “pastoral.” If that’s right, in Steam Fence, we have industrial pastoral.