Blog : Sunshine Has Blown Review In Bagatellen

Sunshine Has Blown review in Bagatellen

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Crowd sounds, an insistent ratchet, harsh metallic rubbing. Still, the initial impression one gets from the opening track here is one of tonality. Roundabout, perhaps, but you're pretty sure it's going to get there—except that it doesn't, not quite. It teeters, giddily if not drunkenly, on a thin edge between repeated, backwards tape loops and a low thrum of possibly guitar-ish origin on the one side and blithely diffident noise on the other. The listener is almost forced to imagine a physical location, maybe some strange arcade, where the host of simultaneous and contradictory sounds can be reconciled, Fascinating, unbalancing music, this.

Sunshine Has Blown is an initiative led by Joel Stern along with Adam Park. The latter supplies the almost omnipresent tape manipulation while Stern divides time between electronics, guitar, trumpet, violin, mbira and other objects. The four performances are from live events in late 2005 and early 2006 during which they were occasionally joined by Velvet Pesu (cello, mbira, percussion), Joe Musgrave (turntable, voice, objects) and Scott Sinclair (drums, voice, percussion). They're rather unique. (I should also make mention of the lovely cover, printed on a delicate, tissue-y paper wrapped around a matte black sleeve).

The second piece sounds, at its start, like an unknown tape from the "Bitches Brew" sessions that's been sitting in a basement puddle for several decades. Fugitive, vaguely funky bass thwomps, scatter-spray trumpet and ultra-low bowed string growls are all smeared under a grimy film. This gradually morphs into thumb piano and reverse tape, suction-y sounds that cast a slightly warped gamelan spell before—what was that? —some Venusian lounge band? Ah, it seems Sun Ra has entered the premises. Didn't see the rings. There's no sure footing here despite the relative easiness on the ears; everything's in dream logic.

This oneiric rambling continues into the next cut, shards of hazy cocktail piano placed among the constant backtracking tape blips fading in and out amidst static and subaqueous mbiras. It's murky and eerie, reminding me a little bit of the feel imparted by Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic" in its submergence of music that's almost banal (at one point you hear a sequence that's uncomfortably close to the first five notes of "What the World Needs Now") within an a-musical brew. The final work contains some backwards tape with a slightly march-like cadence that recalls "Are You Experienced?", an unsettling referent in this context. Whether or not it succeeds in suspending the listener's sense of disbelief is the question. I wavered back and forth, the first track being by far the most convincingly hallucinatory, though all four pieces have their moments and plenty of them.

Sunshine Has Blown manages to sound like nothing else I've heard recently, an unusual enough achievement. It's engaging, awkward, troubling and thought-provoking. In other words, check it out.

Brian Olewnick

Added by joel on 22 August 2006