More (mostly) acoustic music from Spiral Joy Band on their album In The River (FEEDING TUBE RECORDS FTR654). Trio of Troy Schafer, Patrick W. Best and Mikel Dimmick play violin and viola with a harmonium drone, and also a synth from the Roland Jupiter range, and they did it in Wisconsin.
Long-standing fans of American underground music will recognise some of the names in that list as belonging to the band Pelt from Richmond, Virginia; I never heard them, but they were very prolific since 1995 and released many instance of their own brand of psychedelic-inspired droney folk. Jack Rose was a member for a while, before he went his own way. Although a 2023 release, the music was in fact recorded in 2011. It’s true that this trio achieve a lot with their all-acoustic approach – it’s to do with generating incredibly rich and “busy” tones, teeming with overtones and harmonics, by virtue of playing constantly on those strings and pressing those harmonium keys, and the Feeding Tube press makes a favourable comparison here with the Theatre of Eternal Music. Certainly Spiral Joy Band stick in the same key for a very long time, but there’s also a certain slackness in their playing which Tony Conrad or John Cale would never have countenanced – I mean the occasional use of vague and undefined blues-based riffs which creep into the music and are somehow allowed to stick around. At least one of the string players here has a good line in note-bending which we’d like to hear develop further, but I speak of SJB as though they’re newcomers when in they have been going since 2004, and have that 1990s lineage. (21/01/2023)