This one is, I admit, a personal pick. The past six weeks of Album of the Summer of the Week choices have all had various appeals, but Yawning Man‘s 2010 outing, Nomadic Pursuits — even for just being two years old — has as much personal association as any album I own.

I only wrote about it a little bit at the time, but from July-August, 2010, The Patient Mrs. and I rented a cabin in Belmont, Vermont, for the whole month. I was only vaguely employed at the time, and she had the summer off from teaching, so we put what little money we had into it and made it work. Nomadic Pursuits was one of the albums I brought with me to review (and I did; review here) while we were up there.

The thing about it is, that month in Vermont was almost everything I’ve ever wanted my life to be. I woke up every day at 10AM, rolled over in bed, picked up my laptop, and wrote. I wrote stories, I wrote essays, reviews, whatever. All of it. I just wrote. I wrote, and wrote and wrote, and writing is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. Well, that and travel, but even the traveling is part of the writing.

But that’s what life was in Vermont. I wrote, and The Patient Mrs. did her work, and we read, and we hung out with the little dog Dio, and when we were done for the day, we’d eat some local cheddar at the small kitchen table and watch the sunset over the lake down the way or knock off down the side of the mountain and hit up the Irish pub to watch the baseball game. By the end of the month, they knew our names, we’d been there so often. It was damn near perfect, living that pipedream and forgetting by the end of it how much it actually cost to make that happen, how unfeasible an existence that was. It was so hot up there, this and Quest for Fire‘s Lights from Paradise were all I had to keep cool.

Every time I hear Nomadic Pursuits — which was crafted by Yawning Man to represent an almost-opposite landscape of the Californian desert, not the forests of New England — I go back there, riding up those empty roads in the middle of the night after some show I drove down to New York to see, or sitting on the patio at night with the bug zapper going. Honestly, it’s a record I can barely listen to at this point, in light of all the stupid decisions I’ve made since then — things like going back to work full-time, and, well, staying back at work full-time, cutting myself off from writing almost completely in ways that aren’t either this or corporately-mandated shilling — but putting it on today to write up this post, it’s a sweet bit of escapism I’m enjoying. We were back by this point in August, anyway.

I’m still holding out hope that Gary Arce‘s new Yawning Man lineup will have an album out before the end of this year, but in the meantime, here’s the opener that more or less defines the course of this whole record:

The recently-reviewed Hotel Wrecking City Traders and Gary Arce collaborative 12″ is available for pre-order now. If you missed it, the two-song, 20-minute release will ship at the end of June from Bro Fidelity Records, the label imprint of Hotel Wrecking City Traders, whose crunchy Aussie noise rock is surprisingly well-complemented by Arce‘s wide-ranging guitar sound, known best as heard in Yawning Man, Ten East and a host of other projects.

Topped off with beautiful artwork from Exotic Corpse and text from Ben Matthews (aka Ben Wrecker of HWCT), the pre-order comes with an exclusive t-shirt and of course the record itself, which is heavyweight blue vinyl and limited to 300 copies.

Hotel Wrecking City Traders and Gary Arce (I’ve been referring to the project as HWCTARCE and you’re more than welcome to as well, I suppose) have posted the track “Coventina’s Crusade” for streaming and were kind enough to offer to let me host. Please enjoy it on the player below.

Also of note, Hotel Wrecking City Traders have set up an Indie Go-Go page and are taking donations to help raise the recording costs to put together their next 12″ release. You can see how it’s going and donate here. Arce‘s next release is a split 12″ between his collaboration with British proggers Sons of Alpha Centauri — dubbed Yawning Sons — and a project he has started with Mario Lalli and Tony Tornay of Fatso Jetson (the former also of Yawning Man) called Waterways. More to come on both.

It’s a cross-continental collision of sounds, and aside from being into both the Aussie noisemaking brotherly duo Hotel Wrecking City Traders and the work of landmark desert guitarist Gary Arce of Yawning Man, what most drew me in to the idea of their collaborative studio project was how different the two sides are. Hotel Wrecking City Traders, who’ve been releasing music on drummer Ben Matthews’ Bro Fidelity Records since 2007, are a fittingly tight unit. The sounds on their Black Yolk full-length and follow-up Somer/Wantok 12” were rife with intensity and an impatient mathematical feel. By contrast, Gary Arce is considered one of the founding figures of desert rock. His laid back, airy tone and improvisatory will have been a key inspiration for bands literally all over the world, and when it comes to jams, there are few guitarists out there who can add as much personality to a piece of music as he can. It’s not like one’s playing polka and the other death metal (although I hear those go together nowadays too), but it’s a short list of commonalities between Arce and Hotel Wrecking City Traders. Apart from working instrumentally, they seem to be driven by completely different musical ideals.

And maybe that’s what makes their joint Hotel Wrecking City Traders and Gary Arce 12” (released on limited 180gram vinyl via Bro Fidelity and Cobraside Distribution, who also put out Yawning Man’s 2010 album, Nomadic Pursuits) so damned interesting. The two-song, 20-minute release combines the disparate elements at work in the total three players involved for a double-guitar brew that’s based as much on improvisational noodling as it is on noisy crunch. It works, too, which is the miracle of the thing. The first track, “Coventina’s Cascade” (10:19) is content to wander in its midsection, Ben providing pulsing bassdrum kicks while his brother Toby Matthews adds to the build on guitar and Arce spaces out for what’s probably the busiest payoff on the release. Hotel Wrecking City Traders showed off some atmospheric tendencies on Somer/Wantok, but Arce takes it to do a different level entirely. One can hear during a break about seven minutes in how the duo constructed the track before sending it to Arce to add his guitar lines, but that’s not at all to discount the flow of what the collective trio come out with as a result. As he does in Hotel Wrecking City Traders proper, Matthews proves capable of holding down a rhythm section, and Toby wisely leaves room to allow for interplay with Arce – who also contributes bass to both cuts, adding further dimensionality to both sides A and B.

Read more »

You can make whatever sound comparisons or analogies you want, to my ears, the debut from Yawning Sons is principally two things. First: mesmerizing. Second: warm. The band is end result of a fortunate ocean-crossing collaboration between Californian desert rock legend Gary Arce of Yawning Man and the UK?s Sons of Alpha Centauri. Presumably they went with Yawning Sons because ?Arce & Sons? sounded too much like they were electricians. In any case, their debut, Ceremony to the Sunset, released by Australia?s Lexicon Devil, is seven cuts of mostly instrumental experimental post-rock psychedelic hypnosis, with guest vocal spots from Fatso Jetson?s Mario Lalli, Wendy Rae Fowler (Mark Lanegan Band) and Scott Reeder spread throughout to act as trail markers.

The story goes that Arce and the four-piece Sons of Alpha Centauri had never met before he flew to the UK to produce a record for them, but when he arrived they jammed and over the course of a week, wrote and recorded Ceremony to the Sunset instead. Not to say the narrative lacks plausibility (Arce himself recounts it in the liner notes), but if that?s how it went down, the chemistry between Arce and Sons of Alpha Centauri members Nick Hannon (bass), Marlon King (guitar), Stevie B. (drums) and Blake (textures) must have been immediate. Otherwise the project would?ve fallen flat entirely — or, more likely, it wouldn?t have happened in the first place — and the intricate melodies that permeate ?Tomahawk Watercress? and closer ?Japanese Garden? would have nowhere near as much power as they do. Ceremony to the Sunset is a patient album, but it feels fast, spontaneous and exciting, striking a rare balance.

Read more »