(2022) Nathan Salsburg - Landwerk No. 3


Review:
For the third volume of his Landwerk series, guitarist and archivist Nathan Salsburg again isolates fragments of archival recordings to form loops over which he layers minimalist electric guitar and, less prominently, resonator guitar, piano, and/or organ. The staticky groan of an organ or bleat of a clarinet along with the static itself thus serve as half of a conversation across more than a century of sound technology. The effect is akin to drone, with the spare, skeletal guitar lines usually acknowledging the repetition of the loops without themselves necessarily repeating. As on the first two volumes of the series, the tracks run around ten minutes each and are titled only with sequential Roman numerals that reflect the continuity of the (so far, at least) three-part work, these being numbered X-XIV. Sometimes, as on “X,” the guitar melody takes a cue from the sample, in this case, joining it in a festive march. On other tracks, such as “XII,” the whirling of the 78 disc perhaps suggests a rhythm. Comparison with the original recordings is revealing. Thus, on “XI,” a repeated cluster of seven lilting notes from the piano playing of Sylvia Schwartz, accompanying her father Abe’s klezmer fiddling on a 1920 recording, and the static in which they are embedded provide a matrix for hesitant clusters of reverby guitar notes into which single, elongated fiddle tones occasionally intrude. The result, like the traditional tune, feels neither quite minor nor major; the pace is glacial, but the ten minutes nevertheless pass swiftly in the trance-like state that the track induces. There are numerous little details that give the compositions a sense of forward motion. Spare, isolated piano chords surface around 3:00 to share space with the guitar on “XI,” for instance, while on “XIV” an organ takes over for the guitar from around 4:00 to 6:00 before retreating into the background. On “XIII,” driven by a sample from a klezmer orchestra, the guitar begins with chords, shifts to single-note runs, picks up the tempo briefly in the closing minutes, and returns to the chords at the end. The use of sonic artifacts in guitar music is shared with, for instance, Daniel Bachman and traces back at least to John Fahey’s fourth album. In Salsburg’s case, the noise plays more of an elemental than a narrative role, creating along with the loops the architecture of the sound. Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete. It is easy to imagine that Sylvia and Abe Schwartz, if somehow able to hear “XI,” would marvel and approve. — dusted


   


Track List:
01 - IX
02 - X
03 - XI
04 - XII
05 - XIII
06 - XIV


Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Country: Skylight, Kentucky, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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