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(2022) Dave Miller - Daughter of Experience
Review:
You can always rely on Tompkins Square to release music that is ahead of the curve. In this case and in the past, with last year’s release of Mason Lindahl’s Kissing Rosy in the Rain, for example, the character of traditional solo instrumental guitar music is questioned. For Mason’s album, he used electrified nylon string guitar and subtle brushes of organ to create a complex and focused sound around minimalist riffs. For Daughter of Experience, Dave Miller follows his previous amplified and groove-heavy self-titled album with his Nebraska. This stark solo acoustic effort was born during a two-week stay in the Catskill mountains, where Dave wrestled these beautifully disparate pieces from a particularly tricky 60s Stella parlour guitar. The music sits somewhere between Bill Orcutt’s milder acoustic work, like A History of Everyone, and Sir Richard Bishop’s Tangier Sessions, itself a parlour guitar record. The above comparisons should be enough to have anybody rushing to pick this one up, but there is plenty more to recommend on Daughter of Experience. Like the best intuitively recorded projects, there is an energy present throughout these nine tracks that is difficult to maintain through many takes. Songs like Hopeless Fearless take a fairly straightforward and sturdy refrain and shift pacing and mood throughout, bringing in a dollop of the blues and blending it with avant-garde experimental music to produce something inconstant and exciting. And Haze and Vista does something similar, but with a gentler nature and sweeter melodies, resulting in a sister piece providing perfect light to the former’s shade. The Single Petal of a Rose is a more mischievous piece, using harmonics, pauses and more unpredictable picking to create a mercurial tune. The spiralling line in the middle nicely evokes the fragility of nature, while the calmer picking captures its moments of softness and quietude. Gentler is Lushing, which builds around softly arpeggiating notes tiptoeing around space and the ever-present and charming buzz from the decrepit old guitar. The most extended piece here, it takes its sweet time accompanying you through its phases until showing you the door with calm high notes. It’s lovely, and the whole album is incredibly intimate (you can hear Dave’s breathing along with the string buzzes on many songs), the kind of work that uses the most basic of tools to do something new, in this case, challenge many solo instrumental guitar music tropes, while delivering beautiful, quietly powerful music.
Track List:
01 - Take My Leaves, America !
02 - And Haze and Vista
03 - The Single Petal of a Rose
04 - O Sleeper, What Is Sleep
05 - Hopeless Fearless
06 - Lushing
07 - O Envious Angel
08 - Wonderful
09 - Death in Everyday Life
Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, alternative folk
Country: San Francisco, California, USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
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