Sila Shaman - Brief West Coast Tour (2020)

After a Brief West Coast Tour, pianist Sila Shaman joined tour mate Storrs in the Sound Shack, where the pair crafted perhaps the finest recording in Louie Records' discography.

The music is meandering, spacious, searching, unfailingly beautiful. "No Over" is a drum kit/piano duet that shifts from one dimension to the next. Telepathic interaction is the plan of the day. Storrs and Shaman traverse alluring reveries and prickly agitations over the course of its thirteen-plus minutes. "I Felt Itchy" travels similar terrain in a deep exploration of the possiblities of piano/drum set poetics. There are also sounds created by using the width and depth of the room—the Sound Shack. All this spontaneity feels like something created in nature—wind in the trees, crystalline water bubbling over Gabriel Garcia Marquez' dinosaur egg rocks in the river on "Resolution." And distant thunder. And echoes off the ice in an extraterrestrial atmosphere on a distant globe, Titan or Ganymede ("Same As Nine"). Or the march of an invasion of insectile robots ("Meeting Adjourned").

Storrs includes a pair of "salvaged via overdub" pieces that feel like a marriage of the soundscaping of Jon Hassell merged with the percussive joy of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Henry Threadgill's unpredictable odd instrumentation extrapolations.

All of these sonic disparities deftly sequenced to create a cohesive mood from the mind of Dave Storrs.