Joel Stern / Anthony Guerra - Stitch

CD from Impermanent Audio

Buy Now $22.00 from Joel Stern and Friends

Stern / Guerra Stitch electronics, field recordings, electric guitar recorded and edited in london, december 2001 - june 2002 cover art - Mr. Snow impermanent recordings : Along with musicians like Paul Hood, Philip Jeck and Keith Rowe's MIMEO orchestra, Anthony Guerra and Joel Stern would be equally at home on stage at a leftfield electronica night or at one of the free improv clubs sequestered in pub function rooms up and down the country. If there are barriers between experimental electronica and free improvisation, this lot are breaking them down. Stern and Guerra's aesthetic is minimal, mysterious. Using electronics, guitar and field recordings, they open with glassy, hovering drones, punctuated with muffled blips, faint subterranean rumbles and occasional shards of noise. But unlike many of their contemporaries, Stern and Guerra vary their approach from track to track. Sometimes they come on like a more abstract Fripp and Eno; other times we could be listening to recordings of sunspot activity, a shortwave radio lost inside the plumbing or fragments of a long lost session from Tony Conrad. Guerra's not afraid to actually play the guitar conventionally either, and his dolorous, hesitant chording is heard to beautiful effect on the gorgeous closing track. Gentle hisses and pops emerge as the guitar is looped into an aching cascading figure which seems to be gently erasing itself, as if the oxide was flaking off an old tape. Eventually the loop gets clearer, more celestial. Grainy, long feedback tones emerge; a door opens somewhere. Someone enters a room. It's one of the loveliest things I've heard in a while. It's this variety (and the fact that they're unafraid of creating some very lovely noises on occasion) that make Stern and Guerra a more interesting proposition than many of the other ultra-minimalists mining similar seams. Unreservedly recommended. Peter Marsh BBCi website