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Those of you who only know Trey Gunn
from his stint with King Crimson will be pleasantly surprised to
hear that the guy’s solo output contains much more than the often
weird and complex time signatures he delivers for big boss Robert
Fripp. In order to make the solo material from Gunn known to the
unsuspecting musiclovers out there, his new label Inside Out has
just released “Untune the sky”, a retrospective sampler containing
selections from Trey’s previous six solo outings. Knowing his great
ear for detail you simply can’t hear ‘The glove’ was recorded live
as it sounds as if it was recorded in a studio. For sure the
audience present knows how to appreciate a great piece of music.
With ‘Killing for London’ Trey demonstrates his great technique on
the Warr guitar, a 10-string touch guitar with the range of a piano
which he taps. To my ears the sound evokes the march of camels in
the desert. Camels in London ? In order to make this CD interesting
even for the most diehard Trey Gunn fan two alternative mixes also
grace this album next to an unreleased 9’ track. The alternate mixes
are different to the mixes done by David Bottrill who left out
certain parts which are introduced again here. ‘Take this wish’
really is a very captivating song mainly backed by inventive
percussion. Here you get the full tabla outro as delivered by Bob
Muller. Very addictive indeed !
Also in ‘Rune song’ percussion plays a
very important part as counterpart to the Fripp-like drones. Tabla’s
most certainly play a very important part in the life of Trey. In
‘Puttin’ on the white shirt’ he lets them combine with Herb
Alpert-like trumpet backed by Frippertronics adding a lot of rhythm
to the song. Towards the end even a slight salsa-feel creeps in as
well. With ‘Arrakis’ the tone mainly becomes ominous mainly due to
the dark chords, whist the bass keeps on repeating the same sequence
over and over again as if it’s a loop. A more modern approach is
noted during the so far unreleased ‘The cruelest month’. By fusing
bits of narration into the music and it’s repetitive nature, this
song kind of makes me think of a band like The Orb who also
introduced a lot of studio trickery into their work. Long stretched
ambient soundscapes form the basis for ‘The gift’ which act like the
ideal soundtrack to go with images of desert places whether on earth
or on a distant planet. This compilation ends with the short
‘Hootenanny at the pink pussycat café’ which contains a lot of
freaky organ and fretless bass to make it the kind of work you could
expect from Derek Sherinian’s Planet X.
This
wonderfully packaged set also contains a bonus DVD featuring seven
live performances, interview footage and several video montages. As
Trey has just started his very own multimedia company in Seattle
called ‘7 directions’ he could experiment for his own DVD. “Untune
the sky” most certainly is a well documented comprehensive look into
the solo escapes from one of the world’s leading musicians including
some very tasty instrumental explorations. |
