C J Boyd - Aerial roots

My first proper post (simply to get something up for reading) is a review i wrote a little time ago.

Sometimes it is easy to forget just why guitar has become such a privileged instrument among the western civilization. If we ask ourselves how much of the guitar based music we listen to is actually guitar and not its distortion or reverb external to the it, many of us would be surprised to find the answer being very thin with regards to the former.
CJ Boyd is attempting to do for guitar (in this case bass guitar) what many of his contemporary composers have achieved for piano, that is honing in on their instrument and allowing it to be a means of pure expression.

In his setup to achieving such a clear dynamic Boyd has given his three tracks lots of room to develop both in space and time with the few instruments that grace the album embracing 19 minutes to prove their worth in the last track “We know time”.

The clearness of the record is often grand. There is a want for the listener to take in every delicacy of the guitar, to conceive every degree of its magnificence! Boyd in doing this limit’s the complementing music to that of only atmospheres or shadows of instrumentation in the beginnings of his tracks. This focused approach helps manifest every harmonic overtone of the guitar, and suddenly when we allow ourselves to perceive so, these intricacies we hear become not one instrument but many.

The title Aerial roots is a well chosen name, for if this album were transcribed visually (as is attempted on the cover) you would be able to see the vibrating strings approaching and stretching for the ground , yet remaining air-bourn on the opening moments of the album, and moving with their own will and direction in the middle parts of “Pensive pez“.

Further to the original point posed Boyd has removed a couple of hundred years worth of skin and flesh from the guitar in order to ask whether it is still a beautiful thing and in reply it has answered back “yes!”. Things are rightly being kept simple and to dismiss Boyd due to a lack of up-building to ones desired proportion would be somewhat of a mistake in my mind, for the holding back of releasing ones full prowess is an art of itself. I say “somewhat of a mistake” though because Boyd doesn’t ever fully reach this ideal, so hard a goal to make. The improvising does indeed sound a little uninterested at some points especially on “Pensive pez” though infrequent and nearing the twelve minute mark of “Everytime I don the ski mask” it approaches a sort of polymorphic state very admirable making the failures fairly negligible. The effort then is there and I await his next release with keen interest.

Introductory message

This blog i hope shall be a directory of many directions. Yet each with the same goal in mind, to help gain understanding of the beauty that can be felt all around us and that has been prounced upon by many people over the centuries.
In doing so i hope to give my thoughts on many subjects; films, music, literature, language, food and any other topics man has managed to manipulate or more fittingly has persuaded to his own imagination and will. Or conversely has liberated himself to such a path of that art.

I will talk as clearly as i can, though i am sure to make many mistakes, and i shall try and give lessons in subjects which interest me so as to teach any reader what i can. Because to teach someone else is also to teach oneself.

Going back to what i said at the start this is for people with an interest in anything no matter what it may be. And if it brings some enjoyment and aggreement to even a single person i will be very happy with that!