Redwoods Interpretive by Courtis • Wobbly • Dimuzio

There wasn’t even time to visit the Redwoods. In 2019, Argentine sound artist Alan Courtis visited the San Francisco Bay Area for 48 hours to play and record with electronic musicians Thomas Dimuzio and Jon Leidecker. Courtis’ intuitive and abstracted approach to guitar fed the inputs of the machines piloted by his collaborators, deploying techniques of real time live-sampling and machine listening to create sonic labyrinths of unarbitrary complexity. In the resulting interlace, any decision made by Courtis instantaneously guides and provokes every other layer in the mix, creating a kind of technological music that only humans can produce. ’Redwoods Interpretive’, the album that emerged from these 48 hours, is constructed solely from the studio recordings made before and after their two public concerts: the trio’svery first meeting, recorded at Gench (Dimuzio’s formidably equipped home studio) only hours after Courtis’ landing, and an extended radio improvisation broadcast live in the dead of night on Negativland’s long-running program “Over The Edge” — mere hours before Courtis’ departure from the Bay. For even if there had been time for this trio to leave the city, one would only encounter that lost and increasingly dangerous monarch who wanders the shrinking woods, confronting anyone foolish enough to expect to find solace on a hike, and demanding of them to be given that master list of Rules Which Govern The Changing Of Rules. Those woods within reach of the city are already lost to us, patiently awaiting an end to our electrical humming, and so this album — as it is with any music

Fate, happenstance, synchronicity or coincidence may have brought Argentine Alan Courtis and Thomas Dimuzio together as a unit. Whatever the means the ingredients stick and make for a deadly sweet concoction. Wobbly adds to the fray spicing up their latest release.