There’s a real lustre to the second side of The Blue Hour by Loren Connors and Alan Licht, as the tenebrous and waterlogged chords of Connors who makes a rare outing on the piano are joined by the weighty strums of Licht’s guitar, a ballast which steadies the course while channelling the forgotten bluesman Jackson C. Frank’s lilting and spectral ‘Just Like Anything’.
Culled from a second night at London’s experimental hotspot OTO where the duo celebrated thirty years of playing together plus the release of their atonal live document At The Top Of The Stairs, the first side of The Blue Hour commences with Connors on the piano stool for the first time in their long history of collaboration, his staggered keys and Licht’s gnarled slides adopting shadowy forms, before Connors stands up and summons a whole cathedral of fumy and haunted feedback. Then as the keys become more scratchy or seep out in big inky splotches as the second side of The Blue Hour draws to a close, plucked strings laden with distortion carve shapes and radiate from within the fog, plaintive yet restful, half in love with easeful death even as the tandem churn without end.
