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Robert Horton, "Dirt Speak"
Robert Horton weaves together drones, field recordings, improvisations on homemade instruments, and digital manipulations in the creation of this excellent, otherworldly recording. His explorations go in such a variety of directions and altered states that it is hard not to be a little awestruck in their wake.
The album opens with the incantation "Magus." Joining its harrowing drones are metallic strings and a horn, though the true source of the latter elements are little difficult to discern considering how frequently he creates his own instruments. After that attention-grabbing opening track, he takes it a step further with the trance-inducing "Long Period Event," a quasi-mystical devotional that inhabits its own reality altogether.
One of the things that Horton does well is the way he makes music from non-musical objects. He creates "Fire" from running a contact microphone over a wood stove while on "Musclefish" he plays with raw, uncooked noodles. Some of these tracks benefit from some digital manipulation afterwards, but the editing is so subtle that it leaves no obvious fingerprints. His own four-stringed invention, the boot, shows up on the harmonic-obsessed "What Is Left Unsaid," and the album's title track reveals his admiration for the slide guitar. Closing the disc is "Tuning Emperor Norton" in which Horton adds a khaen to the time-stretched drone of the orchestra tuning up for Gino Robair's opera about San Francisco's Emperor Norton.
This meditative piece is a fitting finale to a cycle of songs that continually venture into cathartic regions. Horton covers a lot of territory with this album, hazing it all with a gauze of glory and wonder.
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