For the last four decades, Loren Connors' guitar miniatures have crept from mysterious and twilit corners, places where bits of blues, jazz, rock, and ambient abstraction formed messy assemblages. Thin little riffs stopped mid-phrase; chords splintered, as if Connors had simply forgotten he was playing them. Background noise cycled through the recording. At first blush, Connors' music can sound casual and even errant, the practice reels of someone learning to play.
But stay with it, and the internal logic of Connors' work becomes evident. Rather than mimic the blues of his forebears and heroes, he splits their style open and reorders the elements. In doing so, he can weep with his guitar, moan, exclaim and even stare (almost silently) into the middle distance. To that end, the newly resurrected Blues: The "Dark Paintings" of Mark Rothko is one of the more revelatory sets of Connors' career, one that finds him vocalizing through six electrified strings and adds another emotional sphere to his repertoire.
The restored and remastered edition from Family Vineyard—an imprint that's done essential work in both preserving and pushing Connors' legacy since its second release, in 1999—almost doesn't qualify as a reissue. Sure, it has all the trappings, like a new cover (one of Rothko's "dark paintings," in fact), new liner notes, and archival addendums that include the original liner notes. But Dark Paintings was barely issued, anyway. Connors originally released it in 1990, under the short-lived named "Guitar Roberts" and on his own label, St. Joan Records, in a hand-made edition of between 200 and 300. For years, its seven tracks have existed mostly as a phantom, something you pilfered from an MP3 blog or heard about rather than heard. At last, however, one of the best documents from an essential, transitional phase of Connors' career is widely available. It's another chance to hear more of him and to understand his quiet intensity.
"Blues No. 4", for instance, begins with a frail melody, Connors stepping up and down across the neck. He applies the same pattern across the instrument's range, high notes that nearly squeal countering low ones that sulk. He stretches some into rock'n'roll leads but mostly lets the notes circle around one another, allowing for variations so slight you barely notice. The music's relative simplicity highlights his vibrato, or the way that the whole piece seems to wobble in time. Using only an electric guitar and a four-track recorder, Connors conjures the essence of a battered old 78, a song spit out by the horn of a hulking Victrola. Connors sings these blues with his fingers.
Likewise, during "No. 6", Connors sounds alternately like an opera singer and Bessie Smith, with the soprano pleas of his guitar's upper register cutting against a blanket rumble of low notes. Dense tangles unwind into long threads for "No. 2". Each time, it's as if you can hear him sigh beneath some heavy burden, like Robert Johnson lamenting the last fair deal or Geeshie Wiley remembering those last kind words. These seven instrumentals represent Connors' responses to a posthumous exhibition of the "Dark Paintings" of Mark Rothko, a major ideological and technical influence he's long acknowledged. Rothko finished these works just before committing suicide in 1970. Connors' responses, then, seem like an attempt to live among those same bleak grays and blacks but to not languish in them—that is, to survive by singing about the sadness, not drowning in it. The anguish so apparent in the hand-wringing chords of "No. 1" sublimate into a kind of contemplative beauty by the end of "No. 7".
When I recently revisited Dark Paintings, I heard in Connors' work an unintentional and contemporary connection I'd never imagined: These seven songs use instrumental guitar to produce the same immersive effect as recent electronic work by the likes of Andy Stott, Demdike Stare, and even Zomby. You yield to the feeling of it all as much as the technical form or finesse, however accomplished that might be. And you depend on the glimpses of light—the gentle melodies, the sudden shouts—that creep through the void. Though Dark Paintings lasts only 29 minutes, it's work that's worth hearing on repeat for hours, as if you live inside these sounds. The meticulous, counterintuitive logic comes into slow focus, and perseverance engrained in these reflections starts to become clear. Rather than succumb to the blues, Connors and his guitar get them out the best way they know how.
