Unusual miniature of solo instrumental music from Scots player Joseph Blane. His The Spider Room (SUBMARINE BROADCASTING CO SBCA115) was released as a very limited edition cassette (already sold out) and arrives with Odilon Redon cover art – a cropped version of ‘The Crying Spider’ by this famed French symbolist painter and lithographer.
Electric guitar player by trade, Blane tells the story of how he recorded this project inside a disused / derelict school building, gaining access to the premises in the dead of night with the aim of recording himself on his chosen instrument using a cheap Sony recorder. So far this reminds me of the Anna Planeta record (from 1998!) which was released on Phil Todd’s label as two CDRs – the band squatted in an old Catholic schoolhouse and made their music, I think without benefit of mains supply electricity and relying on batteries to power their Casios. Not sure if Joseph Blane also used battery power, but he certainly made use of the broken-down abandoned instruments he found in his school room – piano, flute, violin, percussion, and glockenspiel. He improvised freely on all of these, then overdubbed these instrumental sections onto his guitar tracks, and this is the end result.
Oddly enough it’s the school instruments which seem to dominate the first half of The Spider Room rather than his guitar; we hear more guitar playing on the second half, and it’s here that Blane’s shortcomings as a musician become more plain. The first half isn’t exactly great music – disjunctive, uncertain, meandering, very bitty – but at least you can sense Blane is trying hard to express himself on instruments that he isn’t at all familiar with. When the guitar’s in his hands, what emerges are rather corny blues-based licks familiar to 90% of bedroom guitarists. We can give some credit to Blane for attempting to experiment with overdubbing and editing, assembling music from pre-performed parts, but he lacks the experience or musical knowledge to fashion the material into a half-way interesting form. Although he himself thinks the end result resembles “avant-garde noise jazz”, he immediately shrugs his shoulders and admits to his lack of musical training in these areas.
There was potential here for creating something reasonably exciting – the situation of the derelict room promises much with its spiders and layers of dust, likewise its atmospheric night-time setting, and the possibility that he was trespassing on private property – yet not a single shiver or frisson or moment of tension has ended up on the tape. Even so – this is a heartfelt genuine effort, and I think Joseph Blane may have the capacity to produce something of interest, if he focuses on beefing up his ideas. (01/03/2023)