Tonight at Kelli Shay Hix’s: Steve Gunn, Villages, Paper Hats

Steve Gunn (Harvest Records)
Villages (Harvest Records)
Paper Hats (Nashville)

STEVE GUNN (www.myspace.com/pyramidmerchandise)
…
Native Philadelphian and current Brooklynite Steve Gunn has been a stalwart of the American experimental scene for close to a decade, having done time in the groups GHQ and Magic Markers, and, more recently, as a solo artist. Steve Gunn’s prodigous talent for fusing traditional american song structures with a raga influence is almost criminally unheralded. Gunn’s songcraft is so strong and his playing style so effortlessly beautiful that folks should be shouting his name from every tall building and mountaintop.

“Gunn’s songcraft is so strong and his playing style so effortlessly beautiful that folks should be shouting his name from every tall building and mountaintop…”
— Three Lobed

VILLAGES (www.myspace.com/villagesmusic)
photo: http://i1.soundcloud.com/avatars-000000890848-ei29mb-crop.jpg?57b0a3

Asheville, North Carolina resident Ross Gentry performs and records under the guise of VILLAGES. With dense layers and glacial droning washes of guitar and synthesizer, he creates engaging narrative soundscapes that evoke the shifting fragility of the early ambient movement as well as the elegance of symphonic composition.

“Ross Gentry’s textural synth drones, in the style of Tim Hecker, were a refreshing way to start the evening…”
–Tiny Mix Tapes review of Transfigurations Festival, 2009

As a final potential marketing note, for what it’s worth…. this tour is happening just as each artist has a brand new vinyl release on our label, Harvest Recordings! Steve’s incredible album “Sundowner”, originally only a cd issue on Digitalis, is now being released in a limited-to-500 LP run. And Villages’ debut album, “The Last Whole Earth”, is coming out on beautiful gatefold 2xLP action. They will be hot off the press when the tour starts.

WILLIAM TYLER (PAPER HATS) (www.myspace.com/historyismystery)
William Tyler is a Nashville guitarist and composer who often performs and records under the moniker the Paper Hats. With his first release as The Paper Hats, Tyler utilizes a wide range of influences not necessarily apparent in his previous work as a sideman, and creates a meditative and expansive piece of work with the seven instrumental tracks on “Deseret Canyon”. “Deseret” is a lost alphabet created in the nineteenth century by the then fledgling Mormon church as a means of writing that would stand in opposition to the Latin alphabet, perhaps another symbolic rupture with the culture of the United States that the Mormons left behind. Alas, the alphabet never took hold as opposed to various other bizarre rites in the Mormon faith, but part of what captivates Tyler is the way language influences thought (ironic since as of yet the Paper Hats have no lyrics!) Most of the pieces on “Deseret Caynon” are meant to evoke distant landscapes and lost epochs in time. “Man of Oran” has a loping rhythm not unlike the guitar music of West Africa, while the coda of “Crystal Palace, Sea of Glass” sees a repeated and frantically picked acoustic motif fading into a wall of distorted electric guitars. In this sense Tyler is equally influenced by the great acoustic instrumentalists of the past like John Fahey and Davey Graham and the patient and meditative minimalism of Terry Riley and Gavin Bryars. “Hermit Kingdom” is a sound collage piece almost entirely compiled of home made loops of late night radio station static and ambience, while “The Green Cigar Kept Smiling” is a traditional nod to the ragtime style picking of American bluesman Blind Blake. Live, Tyler uses both electric and acoustic guitars to reproduce the complex array of sounds heard on “Deseret Canyon”. While making instrumental music of this variety engaging is often a quite challenging task, Tyler is relying in large part on the open eared patience of the listener. These songs don’t burst alive at first, they open up slowly and plaintively. It is in this sense that Tyler means to evoke arid landscapes and forgotten scripts. This is music for deep listening and long, slow afternoons.