The guitarists Mary Halvorson and John Dieterich appear to inhabit disconnected worlds. During the last decade, Halvorson has reimagined the rules and roles of jazz guitar by pairing a graceful approach to melody with an iron will to warp, corrupt, and subvert it. In September, her work as a composer, bandleader, and improviser earned her a MacArthur “genius” fellowship. Dieterich, though, comes from what remains of the indie-rock underground. For two decades, he has been one of two guitarists in Deerhoof, a band whose only allegiance is to its absolute irreverence for genre. They make jock jams for nerds, pop songs for noise lovers—a scrappy, self-styled realm where philanthropic foundations rarely tread.
But Dieterich’s Deerhoof are one of the most enthusiastically exploratory bands of their generation, as emphatic and magnetic covering the songs of The Shining as they are splitting the difference between Stereolab and Don Caballero. And Halvorson is the kind of musician who is perpetually down for whatever, whether supplying her singular approach to Anthony Braxton and Bill Frisell collaborations or writing intricate songs for others to sing. On their debut as a guitars-plus duo, a tangle of stars, this sense of wonder that Halvorson and Dieterich share takes center stage for a dozen disarming instrumentals. They score a frantic fight scene for “short knives” and summon the shapes of acid tracers on “continuous whatever.” They flirt with budget psychedelic rock with “my mother’s lover” and float through a haunted house on “ghost poem,” shaping a record that’s surprisingly accessible and emotional for this idiom.
Guitar duos often suffer from too much or too little bravura: They can feel like masturbatory Guitar Center technical workouts, or limp handshakes upon a cold introduction. But Halvorson and Dieterich bring an easy aplomb to this session, captured at his New Mexico home when the two met to improvise to one another’s loose compositions. Early stunner “drum the rubber hate” is a feat of athleticism fit for metal shredders on a tropical holiday. Their interwoven guitar lines move in and out of phase, each player taking a solo over the other’s rhythmic picking. But it’s a supremely good song, too, full of narrative tension and resolution and built with a hook that sinks deeply. Dietrich and Halvorson are self-assured enough as instrumentalists to realize their rendezvous is about something more than instrumental prowess.
Indeed, the most complicated and compelling aspect of a tangle of stars is the rich and varied emotional landscape it surveys. None of these pieces trace easy moods in obvious ways; conflicted feelings are bound to each other like the rose and its thorn. “lace caps,” for instance, feels at first like an early fall day, the sun sparkling at the onset of the golden hour. It is as gentle and warm as the recent Windham Hill reappraisals of fellow traveler William Tyler. But notes start to wobble from their axes, Halvorson pushing them quickly to one side like a cat batting a ball of string, until the whole thing collapses. You listen again, searching for early trouble. “the handsome” is both ecstatic and panicked, “balloon chord” at once a daydream of drone and a nightmare of echo.
Halvorson and Dieterich remain identifiable as composers and players throughout these pieces—you could spot her hard-edged picking inside a hurricane, after all, and his leads often glow like the neon sign of an all-night pizza parlor. But you can sense both players moving toward a shared space—or, at the very least, making room within their own systems for someone else. During “vega’s array,” Halvorson morphs notes in her trademark way, while Dieterich turns a mesmerizing melody into a never-ending spider web. Toward the middle, their styles begin to blur, one’s tricks dissolving inside the other’s. The song starts to shimmer like a mirage—inviting but illusory, thrilling but dangerous, two worlds collapsing into one unstable beauty.
