Naming themselves after almost all of the elements which make up the colour Milori Blue, the duo of Rob Mazurek and Nick Terry whose practise as musicians is routinely informed by the colour field abstractions as well as the sheer materiality of the visual arts band together as C6Fe2RN6 for their self-titled debut.
The shifting soundscapes of Terry’s electric guitar – indeed redolent of the bluesy Americana or seaswept tone poems wrought by Loren Connors plus his longtime collaborator Alan Licht, for instance on their recent set The Blue Hour which was recorded live on the second of two nights at the London experimental hotspot OTO – plus woozy synthesizers and smeared music box melodies provide a set of textures which drift together mostly in the background of these nine tracks, not so much accentuated as picked at and provoked by the metal tines of mbira and kalimba, watery piano keys, rustling bell chimes and the blurts and gusts of Mazurek’s fabled trumpet.
Roiling and chafing the riverbed of these compositions, on ‘Item 1a’ and the album closer ‘Residue After 60mesh’ a more pronounced and sometimes vagrant guitar is offset by incessant bell chimes which sound like the rattling of keys on a chain or flutes which play as mottled and muffled pan pipes. As the title suggests, against a backdrop of fabricating guitar and other industrial electroacoustic effects the mbira of ‘Water Soluble Matter’ sounds especially limpid. The long ‘Degree of Dispersion’ elaborates all of these toots and chimes, these discursions and abrasions to expose the meditative heart of the record, while ‘Item 1b’ seems to channel trumpet lines from Sketches of Spain, muted and carried here with a kind of forlorn triumphalism, stretching them out and transposing them to far-flung locales be it a Turkish bazaar or the Chihuahuan Desert which surrounds the artistic hub of Marfa, Texas where Mazurek at some elevation keeps his experimental studio.
Recorded at that studio in the spring of last year, Mazurek says:
I make music with the intention of placing sound in a certain way that can be exciting, invigorating, calming, destructive, cathartic, surprising, contemplative and many things in between. This music made with my dear friend Nick Terry is a collection of happenings that were recorded at my home studio in Marfa, Texas. Nick is an extraordinary presence of calm and stability, along with a quirkiness, generosity and silent edge that I find quite wonderful. His approach to sound seems similar to his approach to painting, the layering of colour and texture, the mindfulness of scale, the excitement of the edges, the depth of the center, which creates a kind of weather or atmosphere that permeates the room and if attentive enough, the soul . . . this vision is carried over to the way Nick projects sound, which prompts me to generate events on various instruments. The tape rolls, and we are in it. What you hear is What you hear. Enter the room and enjoy.
