"Where are those lasers coming from?" someone asks in the first few seconds. A humidifier drone then bleeds into the studio room with the sounds of rain stumbling off a roof to crack the sidewalk. No need to stare at the lasers, as the sound lowers the eyelid minute by minute-- it's the equivalent of being midway through a 20-hour freeway marathon. Submarine drones and visage-like recordings of footsteps through gravel, a string of duct tape flailing on a fan, and birdsong seep into the mix, further confusing a sense of time and place. By minute 14, tap-dancing rimshots stagger on a trapkit, nearly adding a beat. A dervish-like guitar that disintegrates upon touch hovers in midair, darts about, hides under a table with a whimper, and then shatters a window to flee and evaporate into the heavens.
Such immediate images came to mind when I consumed Tarentel's 43-minute sedative, Big Black Square. The music is nothing new from the San Francisco band-- they've long concocted ambient-rock that seems to illustrate smudged and crumpled holograms of sun-dried wilderness. Big saunters time away as the sound titillates anticipation of events that never happen-- a laryngitis-stricken guitar amp does most of the talking. Nonetheless, for Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Danny Grody, and three comrades this is still some of their most haunting material to date. Big Black Square is a single that the band simultaneously released with Paper White, an EP of leftover minimalist improvisations from the We Move Through Weather sessions.
While Big Black seems to soundtrack a fever dream for someone whose worldview is seen through a lifted Venetian blind, Paper is essentially about liberation and the puzzlement of what to do next. Drummer Jim Redd snaps the skeleton together with a rickety groove, while his band mates steadily draw in guitar melodies or long tones that bring pictures into brief focus. Opener "Isalais Straight" marches back and forth, back and forth on the tom-toms, while guitar chords are smacked awake. Midway, the song falls to its knees and preys for forgiveness as the guitar drones into listlessness. "Open Letter to Hummingbirds" is summed up by its title, in having two guitars dazedly break bread with each other to Redd's steady thud. "Golden State Overnight" continues that premise at a faster tempo until the music brilliantly shimmering into the ether; letting a bass clarinet and violin harmonize and then watch a nearby aquarium clean itself (a water spray motor is heard chugging in the back). The title track epitomizes the weariness that came before as a fetal-positioned, acoustic guitar gives way to the returning bass clarinet and violin that deliver long sustained tones for a funeral wake.
While there are many blanks that could've been filled in places on Paper White, Tarentel's scope is at its widest and richest in Big Black Square.
