CD ECM Records David Torn: Only Sky

2015

David Torn - chitara si oud electric

David Torn – ever-intrepid guitarist, producer, improviser, film composer and soundscape artist – returns with only sky, an album that explores the far sonic edges of what one man and a guitar can create, a solo recording of almost orchestral atmosphere.

It is Torn’s first ECM release since 2007’s acclaimed prezens, a full-band project, with Tim Berne, et al., that Jazzwise described as “a vibrating collage full of shimmering sonic shapes, a dark, urban electronic soundscape – a potent mix of jazz, free-form rock and technology that is both demanding and rewarding.”

Many of those same descriptors apply to only sky, with its hovering ambient shadows and vaulting flashes of light, its channeling of deep country/blues memories and Burroughsian dreams of North Africa. Recorded in the acoustically apt hall of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in upstate New York (and then sorted and mixed in Torn’s own mad-scientist lair), only sky is an album to get lost in, over and again.


‘Only Sky’, is a vast, stormy, sometimes folksy, sometimes splinteringly Hendrixian soundscape, created in real time by his guitar, electric oud and electronic gizmos alone, and it’s full of startling turns.

An oud intervention like a flamenco guitar arrives unexpectedly among deep orchestral drones; a lurching country song gets progressively distortion-laden and dirtier; bleeping electronics turn to churning ostinato patterns like massed cellos, before a beating-wings clamour recedes to a hum; echoing church-organ chords mingle with a haunting guitar ballad; and A Goddamned Specific Unbalance might convince fans of close guitar relative Bill Frisell that Torn has more straight-guitar harmonic variations up his sleeve than he lets on. It’s unique music, and very personal for all its electronic firepower.
John Fordham, The Guardian