Loren Connors - 2006 - Night Through 3xCD

 

Family Vineyard – FV36  898.16MB FLAC Night Through turns nearly three decades of scattered Loren Connors recordings into a vast, unevenly illuminated passage through his music. Collecting singles and other difficult-to-find pieces recorded between 1976 and 2004, the three-disc set is less a conventional anthology than a parallel history of Connors’ work. Major albums established the larger movements of his career, but these smaller releases preserved immediate gestures, private experiments and occasional collaborations that might otherwise have remained isolated. Heard together, they reveal an artist whose essential language remained remarkably consistent even as acoustic guitar gave way to electric haze, concise blues fragments expanded into abstract airs and solitary performances opened toward voices and ensembles. The earliest material is raw and physically close. Connors treats the acoustic guitar as both a melodic instrument and a resonant object, striking and scraping its strings while allowing room sound to enter the performance. Blues is already present, though stripped of regular pulse and recognizable progression. Bent notes, abrupt silences and rough attacks carry the emotional force normally supported by complete songs. These pieces sound handmade in the deepest sense: not merely homemade recordings, but music shaped directly from fingers, wood, wire and breath. As the collection advances, the electric guitar gradually becomes Connors’ primary environment. Amplification does not simply make the instrument louder. It adds sustain, distortion, tremolo and a surrounding field of hiss in which melodies can appear and disappear. Connors’ touch remains economical, yet the space around each note grows increasingly complex. A brief phrase can cast a long shadow, while feedback and overtones continue developing after the initial gesture has ended. Suzanne Langille’s appearances bring another form of intensity. Her voice does not sit above the guitar as a conventional lead. Connors places sparse figures beside her words, sometimes answering them and sometimes leaving them exposed. Their performances retain the gravity of old blues and ballad traditions without becoming revivalist. Voice and guitar seem to remember the emotional shape of those traditions after their formal structures have fallen away. Because the set draws from numerous sources, its changes in fidelity become part of the experience. Tape hiss, fluctuating volume, dry acoustic rooms and saturated electric textures create a sequence of distinct physical spaces. Jim O’Rourke’s remastering preserves these differences rather than forcing everything into artificial uniformity. The recordings remain gritty and vulnerable, allowing their original circumstances to survive. The final stretch contains some of the collection’s most expansive music, including a two-part tribute to Miles Davis. Connors evokes the suspended atmosphere of Davis’ electric period without imitating trumpet lines literally. Tremolo, blurred chords and dark waves of guitar suggest a distant ensemble moving through fog. It is an extraordinary conclusion because it connects Connors’ smallest gestures to a much larger historical imagination. Night Through is enormous, but its seventy-one pieces never reduce Connors to a single method. The set moves through violent acoustic abstraction, haunted song, miniature electric lament and drifting fields of sound. Across every change, the same concentration remains: a belief that one note, properly placed, can open an entire emotional landscape.