Drążek Fuscaldo / Thymme Jones – Wings Dipped in Fire

11.09.23 by Matty McPherson

They say that first love can be sweet, the kind with “craft” tacos and cassettes on the go. It’s where I met with Feeding Tube records, the crate digging record shop with ties to one of those Forced Exposure zine writers who never stopped writing about tapes (Bryon Coley of course, is always a joy to skim and take note of within the Wire). Anyways, Feeding Tube had been out over summer porting a 2022, polish release of a 66 edition vinyl of jazz happenings from Chicago. One featuring their old pals from Mako Sica. Meanwhile I was into dipping fish tacos (with strawberries) into borrego broth. We wouldn’t be equals anywhere else but under the low hanging ceiling and halloween decorations. What was this desert serenade? One lost in its own dream?

Mako Sica–a trio, now recording as a duo–Przemysław Krys Drążek & Brent Fuscaldo have been long standing practicioners in the free noise wold. Astral Spirits-co release LPs, Galactic Tape Archive pressings, amongst a smattering of long standing psychedelic jazz type works. Including the delectable Ronda with Hamid Drake! There’s less of a running theme to these endeavors as much as a long standing mindset. A true passion to letting one note chord progressions and drones document vast hinterlands; the kinds of High Aura’d or Serpent Season in years past, sprawling along the time limitation of a vinyl, adeptly adapting to cassette.

Wings Dipped in Fire is a deft, patient introduction to their world of jazzy outsider ambience of what Drążek & Fuscaldo (fka Mako Sica) are capable of. Recorded at Chicago Electrical Audio, the duo team up with Thymme Jones. Credited with walkie talkie, melodica, trumpet, drum set, & organ, Jones brings about beguiling, layered details to these tracks. Their minimal, often based around a “one-note better than two notes at all” approach that capturing the sly shifts that can come when one element steps out and another steps in. With Jones as a third, the perchance for groove and depth perk up. On Side A’s Inner and Outer Demons, Fuscaldo’s bass dominates the groove, but it is Jones’ melodica that provides a buoyant force to deepen it. It helps that the instrument functions as a disarming dissonance from Fuscaldo’s lyricism and tales. It reappears after Drążek’s nocturnal trumpet solo against his own organ drones and Fuscaldo hypnotic bass, itself drone to the tenth degree, as if to summon a bridge to the astral, gothic energy that dominates the terminal third.

A peaceful desolation marks Side B’s Veil is Thinning. The kind of territory that Ben Chasny’s Six Organs seems to fall into during flashes of the hexadic era in particular. A lulling classic guitar motif that practically collapses in on itself; foggy kind of melody. One that Fuscaldo happens to chop through. Drążek’s horn elongates and practically loosens to the stars as if to call for Cosey Fanny Tutti, while Jones tinkers with walkie talkies calcifying the distance to this desert dimension. It’s a dimension that contains drums as much as the minimalist dread of Seventeen Seconds in its downright dancable terminal third. When they let as loose as this, the tape itself feels as revelrous as a wedding. Considering Drążek Fuscaldo’s (& Jones’) approach to sound, it’s hard not to see it as such.

Edition of 200 Tapes Available at the Feeding Tube Webstore! Digital on Bandcamp below!