Working for almost a decade as Mariachi after getting her start amid the no wave abrasions, scuzzy caterwauling and sometimes almost Sugarcubes-esque post-chanson divertissements of the Paris band mamiedaragon, on her new album Bye Bye Bird the guitarist Nina Garcia steps out for the first time under her own name and proves to be one of the most accomplished six-string players around in that hairy yet still rarefied space between post-rock, free jazz and sheer noise.
Over the eight varying tracks of Bye Bye Bird she supplements her simple palette of electric guitar, effects pedal and amplifier with an electromagnetic microphone, a device which uses an induction coil to convert electromagnetic fields into audible sound. Unplugging her instrument, the microphone draws close to the strings to capture their vibrations from fundamentals to overtones, isolating otherwise inaudible textures to shed new light on the ringing melodies of her compositions, summoning a patchwork of lilting drones or erecting rugged edifices as though out of thin air, exploring hitherto uncharted depths or martian zones as these vibrations scrape and puncture swathes of dormant silence.
Her ostinato phrases range from the meditative to the motorised, like revving engines ready to burn up rubber or slowly encroaching masses which have somehow slipped their tethers, with the album opener and title track veering steadily between the two forms, while ‘Le Leurre’ sounds like a supernaturally possessed harmonium or accordion over a metronomic backbeat. On the unplugged and otherwise genteel ‘Ballade des Souffles’ she drops or swings the electromagnetic microphone towards her instrument, producing sudden swooning moments of amplification, while ‘Pick-up tentative’ is rampant distortion, all crackling textures with a few piercing squeals.
A quick search suggests that the phrase ‘Dans l’alios’ might refer to the native soil of the Landes de Gascogne, an area of now rehabilitated moorland which is cut off from the Atlantic Ocean by a natural barrier of dunes. Alios is impermeable and results from the cementing of the local sand with metallic oxides of iron and aluminium, with Garcia’s composition bolting short and wiry guitar strums over a crudding backbeat, in a manner which is so dense as to be menacing yet at the same time lures the listener into a disorientating trance-like state.
‘Harsh hopping’ on the other hand is more melodious, open and yearning until Garcia’s frantic strumming carries the track forward at breakneck speed. Bye Bye Bird at once summarises and extends so many guitar signatures, from the choppy riffs and alternate tunings of Glenn Branca to the Henry Cow founder Fred Frith whose landmark Guitar Solos were reissued for their fiftieth anniversary last year alongside a more rustic and reverberating selection of new material, from the wiriness of Shellac to the splintering earworms of Bill Orcutt who called Music for Four Guitars a ‘bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record’, or even more recently from the pummelling waves of marked and thirteen sense as the South London maverick Klein shrouds herself in feedback to the bluesy or primitive themes and springy or decaying timbral exercises of DesatornillĆ”ndonos by the Argentine specialist Luciana Bass.
Between duets with the Danish trombonist Maria Bertel and French percussionist Camille Ćmaille, select appearances alongside the pianist Sophie Agnel and the composer Antoine Chessex, a stint with Luke Stewart and Leila Bordreuil’s feedback ensemble plus her enduring work with mamiedaragon, over the course of the past decade Garcia has also played besides Frith and the shapeshifting Sunn O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, a prolific collaborator in his own right who has partnered up with the likes of Oren Ambarchi, Mats Gustafsson, Anthony Pateras, FranƧois J. Bonnet and Kali Malone while running Ideologic Organ, the Parisian label upon which Bye Bye Bird appears. Yet beyond some of the more obvious touchstones when it comes to solo guitar, the opening to ‘Harsh hopping’ is redolent of the Smashing Pumpkins nostalgia hit ‘1979’ while it gallops forth with the restless twang of a spaghetti Western.
A resemblance with Dick Van Dyke and Ann-Margret is less easy to discern. The brief ‘AubĆ©’ carries the limpidity of a flute or Cristal Baschet, those chromatically tuned glass rods played by moist fingers, while ‘Whistling Memories’ eschews wistful sentimentality as Garcia ends Bye Bye Bird with a blowout, whirring through the contorted air before leaving us in a haze of static.
