"Airstream Envy" jolts open with a shriek of pure panic. Erik Friedlander's bow grates across the strings of his cello, wrenching notes into a stunted, disdainful exclamation. Imagine Friedlander-- now one of the world's top cellists with a Rolodex of collaborators from John Zorn and Laurie Anderson to John Darnielle and Courtney Love-- as a boy from New York's hinterlands, maybe 14 or 15 years old, out West in an RV sitting atop a 1966 Chevrolet pick-up truck. His mother, father, sister, and dog are along for the ride, as the truck barrels down an interstate. Suddenly, an Airstream trailer-- "sleek, silver...throwing our reflection back at us"-- zips past the Friedlander summer home. More than three decades later, this is how Erik Friedlander remembers his family losing a piece of their pride.
The initial shock passes quickly, but with his cello, Friedlander continues to espouse a peculiar mix of curiosity and fear with regard to the shiny new beast. The Airstreams zip by, while the boyish Friedlander seems to pick up confidence, an adult intrigue vesting in its possibility. Suddenly, his playing is hopeful and bright, like he's just discovered the future in polished metal. Friedlander knows this feeling from experience: Every summer, Friedlander's family would gather in its RV and wend their way across America, as his father-- the famous scenic and music photographer Lee Friedlander-- completed assignments between both coasts. On Block Ice & Propane, Friedlander's first solo disc since 2003's Maldoror, the cellist revisits those summers, capturing their scenes by painting them with 13 mimetic or metaphorical compositions and improvisations. His memories push from minutiae-- seeing an Airstream for the first time or hearing the piercing sound of a pressure cooker-- to milestones, the easy, sweet dreams of a child anticipating the summer or the unbridled joy of seeing the countryside with young, wide eyes. Block Ice & Propane, then, is a boy's folk anthem-- sweet, naïve, intrigued-- gathered and transformed through a virtuoso's adult memory.
Friedlander's résumé suggests that he's a player suited for a wide range of feelings, techniques, and situations. Beneath John Darnielle's voice on "Dilaudid", from the Mountain Goats album The Sunset Tree, he plays in abrupt, pungent ostinato, his stern repetition emphasizing doomed lines like, "You just can't do things your body wasn't meant to." In his own cello/sax/bass/drums Topaz Quartet, though, Friedlander leans on his funk influences to lock into a groove and bump hard against its ridges. Friedlander wields not only unfathomable technical ability but also uncommon inquisitiveness tailed by imagination. Block Ice, more personal than his previous solo work, is the product of such breadth: In his hands, the cello is capable of long, daunting tones, hanging, impressionistic pizzicato phrases, and short, furious hybrid bursts of both.
During the masterful "Rusting in Honeysuckle", the boy who seems to have enjoyed the vistas of summer but perhaps fretted his removal from society and the perils of the open road unites all three as a man, whistling birdsong around brief, panicked cello howls. Elsewhere, Friedlander adds elements of gentle, loping plucks that imitate the sound of big, worn steel strings on an acoustic guitar, finger-picked into a folk ballad. "Yakima", for instance, sounds like a backseat journey along curvy roads in the temperate airs of the Washington state viticultural area. Quixotic side trips peal from the main theme; new sites grow familiar by journey's end. This album-- solo cello certainly, but so specific of time and place it applies generally to anyone who has ever found wonderment in either travel or childhood-- unfolds in much the same way.
