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Davenport, "Rabbit's Foot Propeller"
Imagine there's an old abandoned farm house on the edge of town with nothing but the woods to keep it company. Imagine a bunch of high school kids held a party there one night and didn't come back. There wasn't any screaming, no bodies were found, no signs of violence; all the kids simply disappeared and never came back. Davenport braved that farm house and made some recordings there, only when they came back there were sounds on their tape that they didn't record. There were things happening in the background that they couldn't perceive. The contents of this disc are made up of those recordings.
3 Lobed
In all reality that might as well be the truth. Davenport's first release on the 3 Lobed label is scary at times, but has a gravitational pull unlike many albums of the same kind. The whole affair was recorded with a hand held tape machine. The result is that many of the sounds are muddy or warped, but that makes each of the tracks all the more intriguing. There's a sense that some unknown parts of the world were caught and manipulated on this disc. It's almost as if the record is a documentary without a narrative to guide the listener along. As such it is necessary to try and piece all of the sounds together, to try and create a thread of coherence to make sense out of lingering moments captured by the tape recorder.
While that may seem like the result of a poorly conceived record, in reality it is part of the fun of listening to music like this. The collage approach to sound might be a playground for cheap free association when it is handled by amateurs, but it can be an exciting and powerful means of exercising the imagination. Davenport temper their recordings well, allowing for exciting juxtapositions to occur, but also allowing for some randomness to take part in the making of the album. This makes the album both unpredictable and listenable. On top of that, anyone with any voyeuristic tendencies will find nearly every track captivating. One track will place me next to a lake with a small wooden boat, at other times I'm watching the trees wave in the wind from the top of a wooden fence, and at other times I'm feeling my way around inside a pitch black cellar, the sound of airplanes rushing by outside. All the time I feel as though I'm watching myself do this. The music is both transportive and cinematic. Davenport has combined many details, several different sources, and a mirage of feelings to great effect.
So while that whole free-folk thing keeps chugging along with its mostly talentless musicians and largely false mysticism, there are others who might be associated with that junk that are doing something entirely different. Davenport fits that bill very well. Just because a freaking acoustic guitar makes an appearance on a record does not mean that it belongs to the tradition of John Fahey and that certainly doesn't mean it is tied somehow to the blues or classic country music. Take this record for what it is: a well-designed, fun, and intriguing collage of places, intuitions, and memories.
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