A somnambulist is one who sleepwalks, and I used to be a pretty good sleepwalker back in the day. My mom told me one time in junior high or thereabouts that I had stood on my bed and stared banging my fists on the wall, yelling, “Mom! Let me out of the garage!,” etc. I remembered none of it. I’d like to think this story ended with my mom and me laughing about it, but I can’t be sure. She may have been scowling at me, or looking at me in a sidelong way, like I was a burgeoning supervillain or something.
Warren Ng is multiple Somnambulists, and the passages that he creates on his guitar are drenched with reverb and delay. Being far more interested in the tonal qualities he can extricate from his instrument, Ng embarks on lengthy excursions along the fretboards, letting the results of his experiments guide him. If “From the Field to the Factory” was going to soundtrack something, it would soundtrack a vigorous sleepwalking jaunt, such is the trancelike quality of its drawn-out tracks.
And of course you can’t get heady with your languid post-blues riffs without punching up the content with a little social commentary. See the title track, for example, for a reverie on the worker. “The Streets Were Paved with the Blood of Saints” conjures some vicious anti-religion protest. “Poem of Struggle” sounds like it’s from the pen of a tragic Dostoevsky hero. And if “We Are Children of the Ahistorical,” what then have we inherited? Nothing but the dead flag blues, if you ask me.
Even if you do it unconsciously, head on over to Zum Audio and grab a copy of this one. Edition of 100.
This here “alto saxophone/electronics/modular synthesizer/mixer” shindig from Ryan Wade Ruehlen, “Time Agnosia,” was recorded in Denver and Boulder, Colorado, in March 2019. In July 2019, I was rushed to the emergency room in Denver, removed from my connecting flight because I was having difficulty breathing after sprinting fifteen gates (and fast-walking the remaining seventeen) to make sure I got on the stupid plane to begin with. (OK, I so it ended up being more of a gentle ambulance ride filled with pleasant conversation with the paramedic and me being diagnosed as a sea-leveler, but why ruin a good story?)
With shimmers bursting from the edge of my vision, I was in the appropriate frame of mind to appreciate “Time Agnosia.” “Science fiction,” mentions the Shadowtrash Tape Group site as a plausible categorical description. “Topographical disorientation.” Got me there. “…Quicksilver movements in sudden formation. Inability to recognize. Lost in familiar environments.” Sheets of high-pitched ambience lay the groundwork for the saxophone meditations, and program glitches and shorting nodes accompany the slow march toward completion. Tones hangs in the atmosphere in humid ambience, the sax slowly stirring them until they curdle. All of this penetrates my mind and adds to the feeling that nothing is real, nothing makes sense, not till I get another hit from that sweet, sweet oxygen canister. Even then, “Time Agnosia” coats my mind like some jackweed is all up in it with a can of puke-green paint, coating my senses till I’m in a state of perma-semi-blackout.
Only in Denver!
Anyway, you can grab a copy of the tape from Shadowtrash Tape Group’s Etsy site.
