A unique figure is Woody Sullender, the New York City musician who we first heard in 2004 on his album Nothing Is Certain But Death.
At the time he was playing the banjo in a highly experimental manner, yet still clinging on to some core truths about American folk music; on one level he managed to explore the “grain of the strings” as he called it through close-miking and scraping and other radical methods, thus pushing himself into various corners of free improvisation and the dreaded “extended technique”. At the same time, he didn’t turn his back on traditional idioms, and gave himself the name Uncle Woody Sullender as an index of his solidarity with great early country players, such as Uncle Dave Macon. Even the “death” theme of that album resonated with listeners besotted as they were then (and still are) with John Fahey and his Blind Joe Death mythical persona. Since this was happening in 2004, he could even have been aligned with the “freak folk” thing that was all the rage at the time (e.g. Jack Rose, Dredd Foole, Matt Valentine), but there always seemed to be something rather complex and opaque about this man’s work.
Well, so much for the backwards glance; Woody Sullender is here today with Music From Four Movements & Other Favorites (dead ceo dceo012), and it’s quite a different clobber of milk churns. Around 2010 there was a sea-change in the Sullender brain. He stopped using the “Uncle” name, walked away from his radio show on WFMU, and even laid aside his beloved banjo to move into performance art, gallery art, and installations. In this, he enjoyed success in various art venues and spaces around Brooklyn, Queens, and even Los Angeles, plus he collaborated with other composers and improvising musicians, including Okkyung Lee, the remarkably severe and ascetic Korean cellist whose music we so revere. All of this is why we didn’t get another album from him since the 2010 duo with Seamus Cater, which was about 50% straight-ahead renditions of American folk and blues songs, the other 50% containing traces of avantish-experimentation (too-high harmonica notes, muffled strings, mutated melodies).
Today’s record certainly reflects Sullender’s new gallery leanings, but also has something to do with computer games and a form of virtual reality. If I’ve got this right, there’s a video game called Four Movements, or music which he made for the game; today’s CD contains “idealised mixes” from that album (was it ever released?) as well as materials drawn from related “ancillary projects”. As such, it’s a rum mix of banjo music with various forms of modern minimalist electronica-glitch, said genres and methods making their way through this man’s brain with all its fascinating twists and byways. For one thing, he proposes the whole work is situated in a “video game space”, and invites the listener to navigate their way through a series of virtual rooms – which include an empty night-club, a loft living space (very down-town Manhattan!) and some sort of “open world” which connects to a “modernist grid” in some way. What the…? If some of this feels like we’re drifting close to Mark Z. and his awful Meta-World fantasies, rest assured that our man Woody is an artist (rather than a geek capitalist) and there’s a genuine interest in investigating the aesthetic potential of virtual computer spaces, as well as connecting everything to a genuine warmth and humanity.
The ‘House of Calm Serenity’ piece here – incidentally featuring Seamus Cater – is but one example of that warmth and compassion. My favourite so far, and perhaps the most successful blend of the banjo elements with the modernist squelches and beats (inspired, we are told, by house music of Chicago and Detroit), is the seven-minute ‘Chelsea’. Two brilliantly simple opposing musical ideas slotted together without any trace of artifice or flim-flam, creating lovely music that will win you over instantly with its understated charm. You may prefer ‘Figment Pattern’, where the beat is even more stripped-down so as to resemble the very pro-active stomping foot of an Old Timey banjo player going into overdrive at a barn dance. There’s also ‘Towards Minus’, which might be more of a sampling exercise – a filtered and treated banjo loop set into delicious syncopation with a basic sequencer rhythm. Compared to the more hard-edged and remorseless avant-techno experiments on the Raster-Noton label, I suppose Sullender’s approach could seem almost naive and clunky, but for me that’s 100% of its appeal. If you just want unadorned banjo picking click on to ‘The Tale of the Brook to the Pool’, complete with pastoral title too (and you can see how a whole album of tunes played this way would find a friendly home on one corner of the Feeding Tube Records label). Only ‘Life Without Objects’ at the end of the album feels a little bit dated, with its user-friendly ambient filters and nice chords and edging towards that end of modern music which I think of as “airport lounge music” for the smartphone brigade, though that’s a bit unkind.
With this unusual and inventive album, Sullender v2.0 has arrived, and it was well worth the wait. From 15th September 2022.