"Four years ago, I was a sleeping ghost at home," begin Chris Schlarb's liner notes for his first solo album under his own name. Though he's released records of solo electric guitar music as Xn, it makes sense that he'd use his given name for this one, as Twilight & Ghost Stories is a very personal album that helped pull him out of one of the lowest ebbs of his life. It may seem odd to make a personal album with about forty collaborators, but Schlarb has managed the trick in the way he's skillfully arranged each person's contributions to form a meditation on solitude.
Twilight began months into a period of involuntary seclusion for Schlarb, when he recorded a rainstorm off the cuff. Beginning with the environmental recording, he formulated a plan to secure snippets of music from dozens of people he knew (and a few he didn't) and arrange them into something singular. He certainly managed to do that. Sufjan Stevens (who plays some piano) is the biggest name on the record, but his appearance isn't terribly relevant to the album's overall success. In fact, no single collaborator makes or breaks it-- the sum of their work is much greater than the parts.
The rainstorm recording makes recurring appearances as the 39-minute piece progresses (split into shorter tracks, seemingly more for reference than anything else), traveling from idea to idea with the same ease that conversations will begin with one topic and end with a disparate one. A bit of drifting on-the-black-keys piano, a confident burst of jazz horns, a brief organ figure, a chord sequence that sounds like sunrise, a pool of layered voices, someone speaking in a monotone, even a shambling recording of Tom Abbs playing tuba, drums, and upright bass at the same time-- these all make appearances, and all find their way into the overall thread of the piece with surprising ease.
Schlarb is also half of I Heart Lung-- he plays guitar, while Tom Steck plays drums-- and wears a few other hats as well. He runs the interesting Sounds Are Active label and is a central member of the Create (!) free-form music collective (the extra punctuation is part of their name), not to mention the fact that he's a busy sound engineer. I Heart Lung's new album, Between Them a Forest Grew, Trackless And Quiet, is something of a between-meals snack for fans, being drawn from four separate live performances, one with an extra member sitting in on clarinet and sax.
The I Heart Lung album, understandably, doesn't have the same emotional or atmospheric weight as its counterpart-- live recordings often don't convey those well. Judging from this record, you never know quite what you're in for at an I Heart Lung show-- the performances range from free jazz skronkery ("Lycanthropy") to roaming ambient pieces ("Maleem Ya Maleem") and frenetic rhythm'n'drone workouts ("Moving Through Color II"). Steck's drumming is able to stay focused while also including a great deal of embellishment over the top, and the contrast between his active style and Schlarb's long, arcing notes is the band's key strength. Open-ended improvisation is the common guiding principle, and though the musicians are skilled, many tracks wind up as intriguing journeys without destinations.
It's interesting to hear two such different sides of one musician at once (and that's of course not to discount Steck), one with surprisingly broad appeal for a single-piece ambient record and another more challenging and abstract. Twilight is a unique and remarkably universal record, and one that offsets its projected loneliness with a great sense of warmth. Indeed, it's perfect for listening to in the very circumstances that birthed the concept, when you're alone with the weather, wondering what to do. Between Them, A Forest Grew works best as a teaser for I Heart Lung's capabilities, a take-away for people who've caught them live, or as a solid record for fans of free improv.
