Be my homeward dove
Toronto's Country Phasers' new "Cagey Doves" is an album of strobe-light steel guitar, for those not too prone to sonic seizures.
Coming very soon: Gleanings from the 2024 Pop Conference. If you were a presenter and your paper’s available to read or view somewhere, please let me know!
But for now…
A Record of the Week
Country Phasers, Cagey Doves (Rat-Drifting)
One half of Toronto duo Country Phasers is Sandro Perri. His turn-of-the-millennium work as Polmo Polpo might be familiar to aging techno heads. His gently insinuating singer-songwriter music on Constellation Records ought to be treasured far more by all the world’s cultish Arthur Russell, Sea and Cake, or Destroyer fans, to name a few; el Bejar actually guests on one of those albums, in a section of one of Another Life’s extended, tail-swallowing compositions. The other half is Kurt Newman (who used to be the whole thing), a guitarist who’s been in and out of town but quietly influential for eons: When I moved back here from Montreal in 1999-2000, the Ulterior series he curated upstairs at the Victory Café was where, after much searching, I first stumbled upon a then-new generation of local experimental musicians—the likes of Eric Chenaux, Martin Arnold, Michelle McAdorey (formerly of Crash Vegas), Ryan Driver, Doug Tielli, and others who would go on to form the Rat-Drifting collective label.
Lately, Newman’s been leading regular bluegrass events at the Tranzac, but while his leading instrument on this album is steel guitar, any purported twang on Cagey Doves is of the most distantly abstracted sort. Such is the way of Rat-Drifting’s mellow anarchism. I don’t have any account of the process of this record. But my impression is that Newman’s guitars generate flickering celluloid footage of hillocks and grasslands that, after the manner of Bill Morrison’s Decasia, Perri’s electronics corrode and vandalize. It becomes like a wobbly train journey broken up by blackout tunnels, lightning strikes, last-minute emergency telegrams too garbled to act upon. A lower-density version of Arnold Dreyblatt’s excited strings, or Tony Conrad or any other avant-dronemeister, but in a slightly folky-slacker mode.
It’s hard to improve on this blurb from the wonderful American steel-guitar improvisor Susan Alcorn: “Cagey Doves [mixes] noir Americana, Canadian folk, hints of circus music, and nods to minimalism in a way that is pleasing to the ear, the heart, and the analytical mind.” … Still, I don’t know what it says about my mind that I feel like it could be background music to almost any daily task, at once soothing and displacing, at a stretch motivating. At least for reading and writing, which is almost all I do. Your life might be different than mine. At least I hope so. But when I’m listening to something like this, the flux of existence seems, temporarily, okay.
So, a couple of days ago, on a long drive back home from out of town, we stopped for a break in Madoc, Ontario. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and felt like I might nod off. So we stopped, and C&S went into an adorable local library, and I was going to just close my eyes in the car for 15 minutes. But I felt restless so I opened my emails and I started reading this piece, and then at the end I started listening to the music, and I drifted off into the best hour-long nap I’ve had in ages. (I’m buying the album today because I want it as a soundtrack to activities that aren’t sleeping.)