We last heard from our Jeff when he
released the debut from his jazz colossus The Unsupervised. Since then he’s
focused on solo work and a summer tour across the country doing workshops and
gigs with his Devil Loops project. In May this year, he took off to the Okanagan to record volume two over a couple days (I reviewed volume one here). The six tracks represent six
performances of six spontaneous compositions—no overdubs or editing, as he
points out in the album notes. As such, the sounds are abstract and elongated,
with Younger allowing himself to harness any sound that
the guitar might possibly make. Interestingly, he doesn’t use any overtly "spacey" effects such as chorus or flanging; he's cooked up his own special sauce of loop/delay, pitch shifting and volume pedals, and some distortion and reverb. Cavernous drones, cosmic reverberations, industrial
scrapings, video game bleepblorps, and tiny insect noises fade in, mingle, then
fade away. There’s even some passages that feature recognizable “guitar
playing” where you think, “Oh, I bet this guy plays jazz,” especially on
“Roomies,” where gentle guitar lines tumble over each other, always threatening
to align without ever doing so, with beautiful results. Overall, it’s a surreal and often soothing
listen that reminds me of early Cluster or Tangerine Dream—not that I’d pin any
of those influences on a self-directed, schooled musician like Jeff Younger, but you know,
if you're into the German ambient spacenoise, you might get into this. In
less-considerate hands, such freedom and minimalism could devolve into some
sadistic feedback assault, but Younger’s approach is much more inviting. This
edition of Devil Loops paints an intimate soundworld that ducks away from big
gestures and grand climaxes. For such an uncompromising, gutsy endeavour, it
has a generous soul.
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