Aaron Turner – To Speak 2LP Trost (Austria)

Over the last ten years, Aaron Turner has increasingly focused on improvisation, and this refined emphasis on free composition has been applied to his work within the bands SUMAC and Old Man Gloom. His most unbridled improvisation pieces, however, have been solo guitar works issued under his own name. On his first official full length, To Speak, Turner dives even deeper into subconscious playing and the deeper possibilities of electric guitar. The seven songs on the album vary in terms of timbre, volatility, and volume despite being rooted in the same principle of pure expressionism. Entering the studio with Randall Dunn with no written material, Turner set out to capture improvised pieces devoid of any premeditation, adornment, or alterations. During the process abstract drawings were hung in the studio to act as visual cues and “displays of things from the interior manifested outwardly.” Ultimately, the “no overdubs” rule was abandoned in favor of pushing elements of the compositions to the forefront, though no edits were made to the original takes. On To Speak, you hear the dramatic topography of the interior mind as articulated with electric guitar in concert with the body. On the album opener “Firelight,” the foundation of an anxious electric hum serves as the bedrock to pillars of sonically degraded string stabs. On the title track, a blown out bottom heavy lead gets bombarded by treble-bleached bursts of squelching distortion. Crooked melodies yield to feral snarls on “Granny’s Pendalogue.” You hear something akin to musique concrète on “An Unpleasant Gravity,” and a pensive unadorned drone composition on “Wingehaven Descension.” Following is a disruption of the preceding calm with the guitar mangling of “Brittle Expectancy.” Finally, in the stormy closer “A Deep and Instant Regret” forlorn foghorn melodies get bombarded by white-out squalls and ragged lines of wounded guitar.

Aaron Turner: guitar, tapes, effects. Recorded and mixed by Randall Dunn at Avast!, Seattle, WA, February, 2019. Additional recording and mixing by Turner at HoLC, Vashon, WA, January-March, 2021. Mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk at Stereophonic, Portland, OR, July 2021. Vinyl mastering and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplate & Mastering, Berlin, Germany, September, 2021. Art and design by Turner.