11 November 2010

Mike Tamburo - beating of the rewound son (2005, Music Fellowship)

Now Pittsburgh-based, Mike Tamburo was born in 1977 in New Kensington, PA. In the late 90s Mike founded the band Arco Flute Foundation, and a few years later Meisha, both instrumental bands with releases on The Music Fellowship and many shows behind the counter. Finally both bands broke up, leaving Mike to pursue a  solo career.

"Beating of the Rewound Son” is his first solo album after several ones by Meisha and Arco Flute Foundation, but already followed by many other releases, as a result of an impressive personal productivity.

Five tracks and just below an hour of length, "Beating of the Rewound Son” is a peaceful and quiet album, comfortable, sincere, subtle and honest but maybe not strictly original. It's the work of someone trying to find his own path, true to his convictions and references, believing in depth and in the strength of his perceptions and emotions. It's a long walk lacking of wonderful points of view where the whole perspective if revealed, but full of authenticity, as a chronicle of a trip in the countryside, between remains of history and new constructions, not knowing on which side we belong.

There is something from musicians like John Fahey, Loren Connors or Steffen Basho-Junghans – the use of finger-picking in the American folk tradition - , but without a complete achievement, more like an hybrid with more modern considerations and relations with artists like Gastr Del Sol or the current scene influenced by the digital electronic revolution – with the use of traditional or unusual instruments : keyboard, piano, tibetan bowl, alarm clock, dulcimer, egg slicer, drones etc – with his particular attention on structures and textures. This record is like an old trunk or stock, a dead tree perfectly used as a bench without being formally changed into it. “Beating of the Rewound Son” is not an hybrid album but mostly the reflexive expression of someone trying to translate his environment with a language at the same time modern and authentic.

There is a floating quality to this music, you drift without knowing the direction of the wind, like a forest moth trying to find a possible path with the multitude of stars. And it's a very interesting shift from the space-rock/ambient post-rock style of his previous bands, towards something more introvert and sensitive.

“Beating of the Rewound Son” is a solid album if it's not innovative or mind-blowing, there is no excess, no displaced pretension or self-indulging aspects, so I strongly respect it because he is not following a specific school of thought and the global sparseness and pastoral qualities of it make it a meaningful – even if not unique – journey.

No comments:

Post a Comment