The needle lands on the vinyl surface of Wawayanda Patent, and the room appears in your mind’s eye. Black Dirt Studio sits empty, the sunlight still caught in the west-facing window, while an array of strings, drums, bells, and wooden bodies waits in expectant silence. In time-lapse, each performer appears in the space before your eyes, channeling the experience of unnumbered past collaborations into a new chimera: heart of Pelt, head of Gunn, neck of NNCK, legs of Rhyton, wings of Pigeons. To enumerate the personnel is to miss the point. Ensembles cohere within the crowded roster to carry out one-to-eight-minute missions, overlapping their expertise into dense exercises of American Primitive/folk/psych/rock/drone improvisation. One collective intuition pours tones, ideas, and traditions into the board, and Black Dirt honcho Jason Meagher documents the resultant sessions for infinite porches and bonfires of grinning posterity.
The nine tracks of Wawayanda Patent share strategies: pick a key, populate the posse, and head into the room with high expectations. There’s enough time and space here to accommodate more sounds than seemingly possible. “Demon Directive” slinks across the forest floor to the sounds of bass, slapped polyrhythms, and sax skronk. “From The Jaguar Priest” ropes every tendril it can into a wreath of banjo, synth, and funereal vocalization. Album closer “Crowning the Bard” blurs the plucking of strings into a textured hum that airs its crystalline facets as other players cast their lines into the haze. Who calls the sessions to an end? No one does; they don’t end. Evidence still lingers of the whistled voices that filled the space — etched into the studio’s wood deeper than wax grooves.
Stream the entirety of Wawayanda Patent below. You can order one of the 500 physical copies or the digital files from MIE Music below:
• Black Dirt Studio: http://www.blackdirtstudio.com
• MIE Music: http://mie.limitedrun.com
More about: Black Dirt Oak
