Joel Stern / Anthony Guerra - Outdoor Bowers

CDR from PseudoArcana

Buy Now $17.00 from Joel Stern and Friends

"Outdoor Bowers" released by Psuedoarcana, September 2005 Australians Joel Stern (field recordings, manipulated objects and electronics) and Anthony Guerra (guitar and electronics) return with another example of their articulate hum and crackle and drone. Although recorded in London there is something recognisably Australian about the sounds on this disk. With its feral bird calls and dry twiggy rustles it somehow evokes the Aussie bush under an endless blue sky. Guerra's guitar loops and feedback drones craft the endless planes, the tentative human settlements and jagged ridges for the growth of Sterns brittle but miraculous organic life-forms. Occasionally harsh, but always warm, this disk is a majestic place to hang out. "During an extended furlough in London, the Australian guitar/found object duo of Joel Stern and Anthony Guerra honed their skills in the post-Keith Rowe strategies that straddle electroacoustic composition and free noise improvisation. On Outdoor Bowers, the two generate a kinetic flurry of tactile sounds from various objects scraped accross guitar pick-ups and amplified through contact mics. Often mirroring the deliberate non-intentionality of free jazz percussion, these sounds skip, skitter and stumble as one of the distinclty stratified layers found throughout their recordings. Field recordings of chatty birds and rusted drones coaxed from the guitar roll in as the other parallel track layers for Outdoor Bowers. At times these layers are mixed so as to appear entirely uninterested in discourse with the othe sounds, creating a rather prickly mess; however, Stern and Guerra concoct polyphonic loops and revolving phrases in much the same way that Steve Roden slowly merges his concrete sounds into an elegant harmonic communion." Jim Haynes - The Wire