Daniel Bachman single on Singles Club FM

A little while back I talked about a Kickstarter for a seven inch series called 'Singles Club'. It was successfully funded and Chris just put out the first record in the series from one of my favorite artists, Daniel Bachman. For me instrumental guitar started with a beat up copy of 6-12 string guitar by Leo Kottke. Going through the endless stacks of records of my stepfather's in the garage one winter, this stood out for some reason, the cover art seemed awesome and the sleeve notes on the reverse side were completely bonkers, not to mention song titles like "Vaseline Machine Gun" (1) for waking up nude in a sleeping bag on the shore of the Atlantic surrounded by a volleyball game at high noon, and 2) for the end of the volleyball game), I had to listen to this crazy record. It found a place between endless listens to Big Lizard in my Backyard and Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables while skating between two pieces of plywood leaning up against the cinder block walls. That later led to picking up a whole mess of Kottke and Fahey through the years which led to James Blackshaw, Jack Rose and straight to Daniel Bachman.
I sort of had an idea where he was coming from just based on the shapshots on the sleeves of his previous releases. It looked a lot like upstate NY and I felt that connection to that Kottke record again, being super excited about this instrumental guitar and attempting to even mess around and play along.
The digital zine that accompanied the single and the interview B-Side filled in all those mythological gaps in better ways then I even imagined.


"Coming Home" finds Daniel scraping a string in a slow percussive rhythm and the insane complex finger picking comes on with a burst of metallic treble twinkling over the regular tempo muted strum. The silence in the melody is what kills me, the extreme perfect silence between his powerful picking and bending of strings. The slide guitar and heavy manipulation of the strings themselves yeild insane dynamics between highs and lows. It's as quiet as the medium will allow and when the strings are struck with his kind of force it's as cathartic as the electronic meltdowns of Black Dice. A really strong piece. How it fits into his body of work is a little overwhelming, without the lyric I have a hard time separating them into albums, this is essential but so is all Daniel Bachman. I like that it's based around this rhythm - as minimal as it appears, the melodies continue on with a persistence of tone. He's scratching the strings above the fret cutoff for a clangy brush sound. It's like watching fireworks. You don't know when these chords are going to go off, there's not even the WHOMP of the shell being shot into the sky. They just lie there and wait in the darkness to spectacularly blow off.

The B-Side here is a field recordings talking with Daniel on a sunny porch outside, birds chirping while Daniel talks about his steel guitar, drinking wine with his parents, his process and why he pressed his first record on vinyl. It's even better to pull the curtain back and get a sense of him as a normal guy and not the intimidating genius that comes off on these records.

Subscriptions are still available for this impressive looking packaged series. Reminds me of Alan Lomax roaming around recording artists for posterity, this kind of exclusive material is what makes this really special. It's a detailed picture of Daniel and on the best format for this sort of intimate portrait. Couldn't think of a better way to do this. Aces 10.

Singles Club Series - Kickstarter

Kickstarter gets a lot of shit for giant projects that take forever to come to fruition like videogames or physical tech and it's not even their fault, but it's the perfect platform for bands getting their fans together to fund a record that otherwise wouldn't be released. Killing the Vibe was a perfect example (shit you could have had Matt play your livingroom for $500 bucks!) of how this could work. The price of a record is pretty constant, you either make enough to pay yourself and the pressing plant or you don't. The same should apply to a record label and in the case of The Singles Club, Chris, who's a designer at Kickstarter and a musician himself, is looking for a couple more bucks more to fund a quarterly seven inch series. I'm a huge fan of Daniel Bachman (above) and that's the first single up in the series along with a digital journal I'm guessing that has something to do with Daniel and his music along with a case for the four singles.
The tracks will be exclusive to the project (only 250 pressed) and the B-Side's of these are going to be 'narrative compositions' with the artists, probably interviews but they left it open for insanity. The other singles up are Small Sur, Woodsman and Wisdom Tooth.

Three more days to get in on this.

Daniel Bachman on Dying for Bad Music

Dying for Bad Music Records let me know about this instrumental guitar savant, Daniel Bachman, a Philadelphia transplant from Virginia and that they had just put out this single on their German based label specializing in these kind of off the radar artists. I love that his label is on the lookout for unusual stuff like this and then putting it out on the 7" vinyl format. I can never get enough of acoustic performances like this from people like James Blackshaw or Jack Rose...there aren't enough guitarists working on this level as far as I'm concerned. I'll sit by the record player, mind blown for a few sides....as much as I try to read a book while it's on, nothing can compete, and it's a mistake to try to pay attention to anything but this crazy virtuosity.

A-Side "Perigree Moon" reminds me of listening to 6 and 12 string guitar for the first time in high school, and searching forever for more music from this Leo character, buying the entire backstory on the reverse sleeve until figuring out this was a lot more contemporary than that crazy fiction had me believe. As much as I was glad to get into his back catalog, I was even more amazed that he pulled off this kind of crazy hoax, at least on me, and that there was a sense of humor in this serious, impenetrable composition. I think the way he got me had a lot to do with really diving into this genre, getting into John Fahey, investigating all kinds of roads where this almost classical music collided with musicians way outside the academic system, so into their instrument they're pushing boundaries as much as Daydream Nation was.
So here's Daniel working in this spirit of the tradition of the Blues, taking a long underestimated style of folk music, and elevating it with highly skilled fingerpicking. Sitting in a field on a crappy plastic lawnchair, his Guild over his knee, playing the same kind of intricate tight, metal string melodies that would be right at home with both Kottke or Fahey.
"Pedigree Moon" is a term for the point when the moon is physically closest to the earth and leads to an increase in natural disasters, and the track is a flurry of slightly echoing notes, finding little precipices to hang off, mic'd live and probably all in one take, you can hear Daniels pick or ring banging off the wooden top of the guitar. This has to be the most difficult music to talk about, you literally have a tiny couple of references otherwise you have to rely on some hardcore music training to talk about the tunings and composition. I wonder if this has to be on a twelve string, there's just so much going on, it's insanely dense and continuously shifting through a million interwoven melodies, at this point I'm still appreciating it on a purely technical level, I'm caught in the headlights.
The real trick is at the very end, just a single strum, a loud one, plucking every string on the way down, that subtly morphs into a chiming tone mastered all the way into the center label. It's a great modern touch to this idea of pushing those traditional boundaries, like Kottke's crazy bio.

B-Side's, "Bloodroot" is an actual plant from the northeast, used medicinally that also happens to have hallucinogenic side effects. This one has a lot more muscular delivery, instead of the nonstop steady fingerwork of "Pedigree Moon" this one relies more on short bursts of picking, pulling the strings almost to the point of snapping back on the fret board, emphasizing that harmonic chime, and the the metallic resonation in this room. Intimately mic'd and picking up all of the humanizing things that make it a live performance; an accidental smack of the body, a string held down not quite long enough. Masterful combinations of a slow, introspective breathy section to explosive heavy acoustic. There's all of that classical training and the good sense to trash it and basically start over in that field just about every morning. I love this kind of instrumental, with or without effects, the guys in Dysrhythmia are on the same page as Daniel....and I just want more singles like this.
This one ends with a quieter endless loop...another reason the single is far superior to the digital download...can you leave an MP3 playing and fall asleep to this crazy hypnotic sound and feel like you're completely losing your mind? NO!

Just read how Daniel did the art for Jack Rose's Luck in the Valley album...it's a small world, check out both of these tracks on his bandcamp page. If you're still unconvinced, there are tuning notes on the reverse of this sleeve....as if you're ever going to play along...

Pony up the extra shipping charges and pick this up from Dying for Bad Music...forget ATP, I want a weekend showcase with all these generations of acoustic heavyweights playing together.