Milwaukee and Chicago were a blast. Highlights: The entire night at the Borg Ward, Alex's scaredy cat beagle, R&S, L+K, Bokeh, Enemy, 1/2 Winters, Brownies, and The DUDE.
Before the enemy gig I stopped off at WNUR's airplay. Check our thier page, there is a review currently up, http://airplay.wnur.org/
I'm not sure how long it will be up so I'm pasting it below too...
As always, I've posted all this stuff on my site: http://www.douglasferguson.us/mp3z
Douglas Ferguson
-C.T. Heaney
A man stands behind an assemblage of wires and tubes, a graveyard of analog audio technology Frankensteined together and resuscitated into a living whirlwind of sound. He carries a guitar, but does not pick or strum in the conventional manner of innumerable singer/songwriters of generations past and present; rather than playing it, he seems to be mining it, scratching, flicking and beating it in search of something undiscovered. Occasionally, he will supplement the cascading crashes of sound with percussion – a tambourine, foot-stomping, whatever is in close reach. The scene is dark, often near-pitch, but when a swooping beam illuminates the scene, the figure controlling the auditory architecture can be seen to be tall, lanky, and intensely entranced in the act of building a wall of noise and layered tones. Atop his head is his signature fedora.
The man is Douglas Ferguson, an experimental musician now based out of Austin, Texas who releases his atmospheric soundscapes on his own label, Distillery Records. Ferguson's guitar constructions feature windswept, reverberating textures which are no doubt influenced in part by the arid desolation of his native Texas. And while the foundations of his work are rooted in the ambient experimentation of sonic minimalists like Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and Labradford, he also channels fragments of the music of the American Southwest, calling faintly to mind musicians like Ry Cooder, or even R. Carlos Nakai. His compositions and improvisations are spatial, in that they seem to create, or evoke, spaces; spaces present in this world, spaces present outside of this world, spaces which are imagined realities, spaces which are purely in the mind.
This is psychedelic music, both in design and in outcome, but it need not be experienced under the influence to be enjoyed. It's difficult music in a sense, but not in the sense of unpleasant or overcomplicated; on the contrary, it should appeal to those interested in a wide range of experimental idioms, from the frozen ambient stillness of Stars of the Lid, to the oddball guitar wizardry of Robert Fripp, to the rippling post-rock echoes of Eluvium and Maserati. It is best experienced with calm concentration and a receptiveness which prioritizes the immediate impact of the sound over detached intellectualization. Above all, it is best experienced by listening to it, rather than reading about it.