Mike Weis - Loop Current / Raft

(Barge Recordings, 2011)

The first hint that you should be listening to this LP right now: Barge Recordings put it out.  The second: it's the solo debut of Mike Weis, percussionist from Zelienople.  The third: It's really really really good (see sample below).  I've been neck-deep in Loop Current / Raft over the past week or two trying to figure out how to convey the deep-rooted, dense, intensely satisfying, gravely revolutions the record contains.  I think there is something to be said of a percussionist who creates something you could conceivably swim in.  Loop Current / Raft (names, respectively, for the two sides of the record) has an indelible sense of texture that is not common of long form, drone-y style albums.  Additionally, Weis has the added sense of a composer, each composition rising and falling with subtle precision, swelling and receding with a careful attention to the building layers of sediment weighting music.  There is a great variety of tones here, all of which contribute to the vague sense of doom that's permeating most all of Weis's work.  It's an enchanting, darkly magical record that promises to please.

Scott Tuma & Mike Weis - Taradiddle

Scott Tuma & Mike Weis
Taradiddle
(05.2009, Digitalis)
RIYL = Zelionople, Niagara Falls, Grails

Under the name of Scott Tuma, I have not found one unworthy release. After the demise of Souled American, Mr. Tuma’s solo work has been impeccable. While I’ve watched as a steady stream of average to incredible instrumental guitar players have jumped on the John Fahey train, Tuma has carved out a little niche of instrumental guitarisms that are all his own. And those guitarisms, those bits of laconic acoustic strumming and plucking, haphazardly layered on the backs of each other like war corpses just ooze a certain hollow beauty and cultivate a miniature hope that is as resonant as the Tuma’s wavery-stringed guitar. I can’t harbor anything but pure love for the guy for such a purity of sound imagination that seems solely his. So what could his coupling with Zelienople’s Mike Weis add to the mix that wasn’t already there? Apparently a whole lot. In fact, I’m fairly convinced that the success of Taradiddle weighs more heavily on Mr’ Weis’ shoulders than Tuma’s. Sure, my previous adulation holds true for Tuma. He still provides that mystically friendly, abstract guitar to the table with nary a miscued note, but it is Weis’s unconventional patter, his cymbal scrapings and clinking bells that swirl up a back drop that of commotion that fits Tuma’s playing so perfectly that it makes a Tuma admirer, such as myself, rethink the possibilities within his guitar. Taradiddle is every bit as breezy and drone-esque as Tuma’s previous work, but with an added umph that really anchors things. Weis provides a hefty dissonance that, coupled with Tuma’s fingers, has birthed this new pastoral doom that is as bright as the summer sun and as dark as a coffin buried six feet under. Really wondrous stuff.

-Thistle

"Dropsy" from Taradidle