A blessed pairing that brings together Marisa Anderson’s guitar and Jim White’s drums in a very intuitive process of composition and freedom. ‘Swallowtail’, an album just released by Thrill Jockey and the follow-up to the duo’s debut ‘The Quickening’ in 2020, expands and concentrates the energies of that first album in a single breath in a symbiotic act full of nuance and moments of absolute surrender. Without rushing, Anderson’s patient lace and circular electric guitar escapades mesh with remarkable fluidity with the drums, always expressive in their restraint of White, in moments of absolute lyricism, which shits loudly in the show off or forced mimicry. Melodies from the road, indebted as much to the tradition of blues and folk as to American minimalism and the spirit of jazz, with as much to be learnt as they are open to possibilities. Always right.

It’s to be expected, given the paths these two musicians have travelled. A scholar of the traditions of American guitar, blues, folk and Appalachia transmuted into the American Primitive postulated by Mestre Fahey, Anderson brings to this legacy a whole host of other languages ranging from drone to Latin music and Flemish, in a process of assertive discovery that is very much her own. In a career marked by albums as recommendable as ‘Cloud Corner’ or collaborations with musicians such as William Tyler or the composition of bands, she also has a strong political activism that led her, for example, to play with anti-state guerrillas during a stay in southern Mexico at the height of the conflict between the farmers of Chiapas and the government. Boss. Jim White has played with half the world – from PJ Harvey to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, from Cat Power to Smog – but it is alongside Warren Ellis and Mick Turner in the Dirty Three that he has shown himself in the most revealing way. A fundamental band formed in Australia in 1992, they have left behind a deeply personal and inspiring music, in a deeply poetic instrumental triangulation, full of stories like those we hear in ‘Horse Stories’ or ‘Ocean Songs’. BS

RAW SUN establishes holistic starting points towards the discovery of Rhythm, within the dialogue between the performer, a Drum set and a Delay effect. With an open attitude, spaces open up to the ephemeral and transitory resulting fragments of sound. It’s a clear acknowledgment of intuition, hence the availability of the performer/ listener and the quality of perception (active listening) brought to sound that makes us sensitive to its status as music.

Following an academic past studying Drums, Pedro Almiro draws on the minimalist aesthetics of the 60s, Brion Gysin’s legendary cut-ups and ancestral rhythmic traditions, and keeps challenging his own practice as both a musician and a composer in Berlin. He has released RAW SUN (Album 2022), Iodine Eye (EP 2021) independently and two tapes with his band HIBYLO, through Average Negative and Kinship. He is currently preparing his next release.