Johnny Bell - Field Trips

A Closer Listen

“Banjo drone” is the very definition of a micro-genre, currently so small we’re not aware of any other album in it.  This is the solo territory of New Mexico’s Johnny Bell, who approaches music with a collector’s ear and offers an album rich in timbre and sonically distinct.  Ironically, the album’s most intriguing moments arrive not in the American Primitive banjo or in the drones themselves, but in the curious textures and field recordings that populate the album’s nooks and crannies.

The album is titled Field Trips not only because of these field recordings, but because actual field trips were needed to gather them:  the base of an Arizona mountain, the cool California coast.  To the listener, these trips now become journeys of the mind.  The album begins with such a recording, the twittering of birds, the rustling of a stream, before Bell jumps in swiftly and brightly.  This is confident, toe-tapping music, nary a hint of the advertised drone.  But then at 2:24, something shifts: backward masking, tape loops, a dissolution of tempo.  And then thick, gentle mulch.  “Forest Floor” begins with stutter, static, radio transmissions and crows.  There’s clearly more going on here than banjo, although Bell’s playing is consummate: perhaps more banjo and drone than banjo drone, but close enough.  Voices drift in, as from an unattended TV; then a recording of an old country song, sputtering through the sonic debris.

It’s wonderful to write that we haven’t heard something like this before; the closest relative is probably Rain Drinkers.  The difference is the contrast between ebullient melody and foreboding abrasion, although even this is undercut by the birds and flowing water.  Neither dark nor light, nor somewhere in-between, the timbre is instead a combination of shades, neither seeking to envelop the other: or as Bell himself declares, “Two Paths, One Point.”  The uninterrupted flow between tracks only adds to the mystery, as one imagines the banjoist wandering into the forest, instrument in hand, serenading the wildlife.  This dream only vanishes when studio wizardry appears, as in the passage of “Two Paths” where the banjo’s clarity seems to shift from 4-track recording to modern microphone.

“Cloud Shroud” introduces the sound of the sea, which means the bird breeds will change as well. The early notes are decidedly atonal, an endearing experiment.  When the harmonies appear, the dynamic contrast is exquisite.  The title of the epic eleven minute closer, “Refusing Easy Comfort,” may well be a description of the musician’s approach.  Combining disparate genres and making them work is the aural version of collage, which makes the cover art fitting.  The happy buzz of traveling between radio stations is akin to traveling between genres or states.  If “refusing easy comfort” is to introduce more color, all the better.  Field Trips is not purely a drone album, a folk album or a field recording album, but a red sailboat approaching a paper mountain beneath the torn pieces of the moon.  (Richard Allen)