My rootstalks are horizontal. They spread, they grow, they allow for vertical shoots at times. I am bamboo. I am ginger.
Lay me in the ground and plant me. Cover me with soil and hydrate me. Cultivate my fruitfulness at seasonal intervals.
Ezra Buchla (son of Don, player in bands), Todd Rush, and tape scene vet Jacob Sunderlin sow four rhizomes of sound on Four Rhizomes (Cloud Recordings). The lengthy compositions spread from a central seed and sprout various buds along an incredibly diverse stylistic spectrum. At times reveling in dusty folk (“under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist”) while subverting it with tape manipulation and synthesizers at others (“even with insects some can sing & some can’t”), Buchla, Rush, and Sunderlin combine for an inspired pairing, their acoustic instruments (autoharp, banjo, viola, guitar) ringing true when called upon, destabilizing when necessary.
When it all comes together on “don’t hit the fly rub the hands or the legs,” the result is a breathtaking ambient post-folk meltdown, a smear of sunlight glimmer distorting surroundings, a visualization that wouldn’t be out of place in the active genetic mutations of Alex Garland’s Annihilation. But that’s exactly what the trio is doing here: mutating traditional folk into gloriously unstable hybridizations and allowing them to run their course, whether by molecular devolution or bursting to nothingness.
My rootstalks are horizontal. I am both plant and animal.
More about: Ezra Buchla, Jacob Sunderlin, Todd Rush
