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Greg Davis and Steven Hess, "Decisions"
I've been worried about music without discernable melodies or intriguing concepts lately because I'm finding more and more that they fail me. A host of "difficult" bands have released album after album of strange sounds and subconscious cut and paste tactics, but more often than not there's something musical, fun, or catchy playing side by side with all the insanity. Greg Davis and Steven Hess both reach for that extra something on this disc, but come away with an important piece of the musical puzzle missing.
Longbox Recordings
I used to be fascinated with how bands made records. First some band would process a guitar through eight billion filters and then play it backwards and in the end they'd apply some trick of engineering whimsy and boy wasn't that great. Here's an album made out of nothing but paper being shredded and here's a record that employs African stringed instruments I've never heard of, much less heard. I would listen to these albums for weeks and months at a time, completely ignoring the fact that there wasn't one catchy song or even a recognizable hook anywhere in the music. I was happy with that, music isn't restricted to conventional melody or structure and many of my favorite musicians reflect that belief.
Greg Davis has exemplified that ideal over his last several releases, concentrating on tonal qualities and minimalist structures, using strange instruments in strange ways and immediately grabbing my attention for it. But for all the fancy production techniques and neat sounds there have always been beautiful melodies, a sense of playfulness, and the presence of shining beauty to counteract and interact with Davis' more abstract tendencies.
His work with Steven Hess ignores all of those important elements; the bits and pieces of a recording that make it stand out as being more than just random assembly of noises. Decisions is composed of processed and live percussion. The majority of the songs are mostly quiet, humming bits of time that don't sound unlike an organ slowed down to unreal speeds. When the album is quiet and unremarkable it simply pulsates in the background, requiring little to no attention. The quiet bits of each song require little more than a quiet space to play them in. When the album tries to draw my attention it does so through volume and increased rhythmic intensity, becoming a busy mass of odd pops, hums, and other space station sounds. The gongs, bells, and cymbals used to make some of these songs sound beautiful by themselves, why bother processing them? The best part of this album comes on the fourth track when Davis basically leaves Hess' somber percussive playing alone. The whole track rumbles and hisses perfectly, Davis' edits audible in the form of background ambience.
It isn't until the end that the record acquires any sort of aesthetic beauty as a whole and by then it is too late; nothing can save this album from the scrap heap of compiled weird sounds. The album does, at times, convey a sense of loneliness that might compound itself after multiple, multiple, multiple listens. However, the time it would take to get there would probably be better spent on other albums, namely ones that Davis has composed. There's absolutely nothing that could bring me back to this album. Davis has nothing but series after series of momentarily interesting edits and warping sounds peppered over nearly every track, but when the sounds are just wild fits of noise and some percussive clattering there's little to become enamored with. If, however, background music that will do little to create distractions sounds enjoyable, Decisions offers it in spades.
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