Skantagio opens through a squelching and specious bass line which plays like a blocky, minimalistic take on the X-Files theme while Wendy Eisenberg begins to spool together short circuitous phrases on one guitar and David Grubbs strings out pooling harmonics. Those shimmering tones bathe and daub the scene in a gauzy, misty kind of light. It’s a captivating portal onto the second album by Squanderers, deepening their neo-Western mystique even though the trio contains a couple of left-field music’s most cherished guitarists in the Gastr del Sol veteran Grubbs and Wendy Eisenberg whose own Viewfinder was one of the most acclaimed albums of last year, captured between stellar sessions with Caroline Davis, more eaze, Jon Irabagon and Bill Orcutt.
The record hails from the same session as their debut album If a Body Meet a Body and while it casts the same kind of beguiling improvisatory spell, this collection foregoes some of the rollicking riffs and the cowboy’s tilt of a Stetson for something still more exploratory and spare. Eisenberg’s guitar gets more knotty on the opening and title cut while Grubbs takes a steeper pitch, aching and angular, crystalline and elegiac in his own way as Kramer the third member of the trio stays the course, the influential producer and New York City noise rocker best known for his associations with Galaxie 500, Low and Butthole Surfers continuing to add shapeshifting bass and drone electronics.
Again styling each of their songs as ‘themes’, the ‘Theme for Narcoleptics’ proves doleful and quizzically fraught. To follow the Western analogy – with If a Body Meet a Body reminding me variously of the genre-defining film scores of Dimitri Tiomkin and Ennio Morricone, the instrumental adaptations of Bill Stafford for My Own Prviate Idaho and Carter Burwell’s end credits piece ‘Blood Trails’ from No Country for Old Men plus the three Songs of Leonard Cohen which match the tone and shape while eulogising the mumbled gestures of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, a Robert Altman special – the ‘Theme for Narcoleptics’ rolls through town like a tumbleweed as the sun begins to draw down in the sky. It bears a kind of leaden anticipation, finding resonance in Grubbs’ name and concept for the album, with the guitarist explaining that:
‘Skantagio’ is a word from Ancient Greek that means ‘sounding lead’ – a rudimentary navigational instrument to determine depth in water – and I learned of it through an interview that I did with Tony Conrad, where Tony had this to say:
“All of this is a part of dredging the past up into the present and, like a sperm whale, taking in a huge mouthful of stuff and spitting out the water to leave the food behind. That idea of time as something that you see ahead or behind and then may not see at all straight ahead is an interesting metaphor. You can think of it that way, or you can think of time being visible in all of those aspects in the present.”
It appeals to me as a word for taking a measurement, understanding the depth one finds oneself in, and doing so with the simplest means possible.
If the ethos for the band name Squanderers is half explained by Townes Van Zandt’s line ‘living’s mostly wasting time’, in terms of descriptors the trio bolt their own queasy and eerie and fathoms deep take on Americana onto slowcore or post-rock forms. Beyond their own rich discographies and frames of reference some of the phrasing on Skantagio reminds me of David Pajo’s work as Aerial M.
Over a long and varied solo career Grubbs has collaborated with everyone from the Language poet Susan Howe to the Animal Collective frontman Avey Tare to experimental musicians like Mats Gustafsson, Stefano Pilia and Loren Connors who offer their own utterly distinct takes on jazz, the blues and contemporary electroacoustics. The limpid pools of Connors are dotted throughout the record, a presence which is especially felt on the opening ‘Theme from Skantagio’.
Meanwhile there’s a certain whimsy mucked with irony from the trio on ‘Theme for Insufficient Overpreparation’, whose title chides sceptics and doomsdayers while sharing in some of the same atmospherics through its furtive fingerpicking and fraying strums, with the bass strings adding a throbbing percussive element. It is a badlands or backcountry type of piece.
By contrast ‘Theme for Fruitful Tangents’ is both plummy and restrained, a wriggling guitar line flitting in and out of the background as the track is shaped around stray plucks and sonar pitches, both sonorous and melodic. This theme seems to get lost in the seaweeds, a drooping and gently probing piece which starts out thoroughly submerged and steadily over the course of its nine minutes attains a certain buoyancy which transforms the scene. Far from splotchy submersibles, it is now possible to see the protagonist porchside looking out over a gilded landscape while still harbouring watery dreams.
‘Theme for All Unawares’ buries its melodicism for what is a more turgid and unwound composition. ‘Theme for the Path Made Visible’ might conjure Robert Frost and is verdant yet yellowing and lugubrious like his strangely dismal and inconsequential poem. This particular path leads almost imperceptibly into the album closer ‘Theme for Undivided Neglect’ which over its first third keeps wishing to break out into a lovely bucolic thing but subsists only in moments and dwells in a state of murkiness or undifferentiated flux. Then in the final third it becomes spectral, the trio chewing and spitting their tobacco before summoning up the strength for one last big billowing swell.
