Shane Parish & Michael Potter - Electric & Acoustic Guitars
credits
released September 15, 2023
Recorded and edited by Michael Potter
Art/design by Michael Potter
N/Z052
"As the architect of Athens, GA experimental tape and vinyl label Null Zone, artist Michael Potter is well acquainted with music that falls outside of normative genre convention. As both a creator of noisy constructs and an independent distributor of chaotic soundscapes, he seems well positioned to comment on the malleability and relevance of the more anarchic side of the rhythmic spectrum. Whether dabbling in droning cacophonies or guitar-based freakouts, his aberrant melodic impulses have led him on a path toward complete musical autonomy, free of the restrictions that dampen the wilder instincts of other performers.
He recently joined forces with Ahleuchatistas frontman Shane Parish to create an album consisting of two longform pieces of guitar improvisation, split between acoustic and electric variations. Entitled On and Off, this collection of twin tracks reveals the boundless creative spontaneity that both musicians have long cultivated and through which they are able to effortlessly draw forth noise that speaks to them in a primal voice, parallel identities lost in thoughtful conversation. Split between “On and Off” and “Here and There”, the former a treatise on electric fluctuations and the latter focused on acoustic pliability, these songs are intricate discussions between friends on the nature of musical collaboration.
Recorded live one year apart, these tracks are incredibly coherent in their emotional connections, sating their individual desires through an exploration of open-ended ambient soundscapes and crisscrossing fretwork. There’s something inherently compelling about these two songs, as if we’re witness to some grand cosmic complexity still in its infancy. Sounds emerge and recede, shiver and dissolve, all in service to Parish and Potter’s unique rhythmic dialogues. On and Off is a psychedelic maelstrom of droning tones and fractured rhythms, an oddly beautiful collage of emotional revelation and reciprocal imagination." -Joshua Pickard, The Southern Sounding
"On and Off, Potter’s new tape as a duo with Ahleuchatistas’ Shane Parish (no stranger to Null Zone), dispenses with the coiled chaos and heads straight to the warm comfort areas where blankets and cushions (or amniotic floating) serve as the perfect accoutrements/venue for experiencing this tape...
Over two sidelong tracks on this C36, Potter and Parish layer their guitars over each other, generating entire hemispheres of imagination in their primordial playing. The A side, “On and Off,” fulfills every person’s fantasy of what the soundtrack to the actual formation of the Earth over billions of years should sound like. The duo’s electric guitars establish the firmament, a tectonic drone ceaselessly undergirds the elements bubbling and flitting above it, and the sky I’m seeing behind my eyelids fills with smoke and fire before clearing to mountains, lakes, and valleys, the promise of green fields and fresh air a millennium or so away – but that’s not a long time on the Cosmic Calendar!
“Here and There” covers side B and showcases Parish and Potter’s acoustic chops, a set recorded a year removed from “On and Off” but a thematic and sonic cousin nonetheless. Again over a reverberating drone, the duo picks riverine melodies through newly cut valleys as animal and plant life spring into being at their passing, drifting into the expansiveness of evolutionary process. The movement and tactility of the guitar interplay is like blood through veins, a vital process of circulation to ensure all parts of the body (including the brain!) are properly nourished. Overlaying the body’s roadmap on the Earth’s contours ties the concept together, a universality of flesh and soil and the source of connection. It’s like a proto-proto-proto folk outline simmering in the mineral baths." -Ryan Masteller, Tabs Out
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