Fognode - Porch Music EP
Brian Siskind, who records urban travelogues under the guise of Fognode, is building a new home studio. Taking a break from the maze of wires and software patches, he wandered out to his porch with a microphone, amplifier and lap steel guitar. The result of his afternoon break is a twenty minute EP of slowly evolving atmospherics. The Porch Music EP is lazy lullabies for when you want to let your brain go and unwind all the kinks in your spine and back.
Brian says this isn't his normal thing: more of an idle afternoon spent testing tones and looping sounds to their elastic point. Two of the tracks, "Verdant" and "Stall Sighting," are just a bit over two minutes long and they are short Frippertronic-type meditations on a single melodic phrase. The longest of the five tracks, "Graham Bell," wanders in slowly like the fog drifting across the bay in the early morning, slowly devouring the headland and the anchored ships. Chords begin to be stacked in layers, their decaying edges fading into a swirling eddy of open sound as the lap steel works towards the closest semblance any track on the EP has to an actual peak experience. "West" falls somewhere between the two edges of the spectrum: tones stretching like sticky clouds across a lavendar sky while a tenous breath of a loop structure propels the track towards the horizon.
"Duquaine" is the real standout track though, a slowly evolving duet between Brian's slumbering guitar and the cheerful birds in his front lawn. Deftly weaving the field recording of the avian song into the mix of his slow tone guitar, he creates a piece that will easily transport you out of your meat space into another place. "Duquaine" alone is worth your time; the fact that the rest of the Porch Music EP is such delightful bliss is a total bonus.
Now I need to go shake the Paypal tree and see if I can't free up enough scratch to leave a little something in the tip jar. It's generous that Brian is giving his solitary musings away for free, but he's got to power all the gear in the studio somehow.
Fognode [2004]
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