I heard of Open City through guitarist Peter Kolovos’ fantastic solo record from 2009, New Bodies. Kolovos’ uniquely fragmented approach to the guitar was honed in the Los Angeles-based improvisational trio Open City, so I tracked down a pair of their albums: L.A. We Revise Your Neglect (2002) and The Birth of Cruel (2003). I tend to prefer listening to the latter, which better documents the louder side of the trio, opting for a more abstractly textural sparseness than of the former.
The trio performs dynamic improvisations, able to sustain explorative loud sections about as well as more ponderous, haunting, and slightly silly parts. Hints of Kolovos’ guitar-toggling abuse further explored on New Bodies appear here; often, it’s thrilling how well Kolovos’ hiccup-y guitar echoes mesh with co-guitarist Doug Russell, even when the guitars tend to unexpectedly clip and morph. Drummer Andrew Maxwell is also dynamic in the same unpredictable sense, briefly rhythmic before going silent or scraping at his kit’s hardware.
The Birth of Cruel is constantly abstract, but not without a sense of group understanding — it’s even fun at points, with the guitars urged to perform nuanced glitches or richly textured drones at any moment. Best yet, the LP ends on a locked groove of humming low-frequency guitar drone — The Birth of Cruel has no end! Less cloyingly: it rewards active listening, so as to not miss one of the many scattered creative ideas being played between the trio.
Writing about Open City today, however, yields me with an uncommon problem: there’s really not much on the internet about this trio. No Youtube videos (at least none of Open City themselves, though a few videos of Kolovos playing solo are out there), less than a hundred listeners on last.fm, and their name is broad enough that an unspecific search merely yields several city development pages. Aside from pages on Thin Wrist’s website for their now out-of-print records, the trio’s online presence is nil. That leaves me with the basic facts —according to The Birth of Cruel’s liner notes: no edits, no overdubs. Better excuse to let the music speak for itself.
