You might think you feel at home with the opening cut on Badminton, The Volleys (PUBLIC EYESORE 155), but this duo plunge straight into the deep end thereafter, and from ‘Hyderabad One’ the sound broadens out into unknown territories and grows stranger by the minute. Jay Kreimer and Bryan Day take us with them on that deep plunge, which starts as a dip in the swimming pool but turns out to be something much more serious, involving the Grand Canyon and no safety net, with only a worn-out mattress awaiting us to cushion the fall.
These two are old sparring partners, in this group for over 15 years and also performing as Mighty Vitamins for 20 years. Bryan Day is based in California and I think Kreimer might be too, although he’s a globe-trotting fellow and spreads his benevolence to the other side of the world at the drop of a travel bag. For instance, this album was recorded in various parts of India during 2022, including Bangalore and Baroda; I think Kreimer knows this part of the world quite well and had a Fulbright scholarship to study wedding music there, but he’s toured all around the world with his ideas, his instruments, and his performance. He’s also been recognised by the Pauline Oliveros foundation as a certified teacher of the Deep Listening approach developed by her. He is described as a sound artist and a sculptor, and (where he overlaps with Bryan Day in the great Venn diagram of US polymaths) an inventor of home-made musical instruments. Matter of fact this whole album was made with such contraptions, about which no further details are forthcoming; non-believers who hate our music would listen to this and hear the remnants of a junkyard as they scoff, but I know we can discern the subtleties afforded by hand-wired electronic toys, reworked metal used as percussion, and solo excursions performed on things that had once been guitars, or not. More likely to have been three old guitars welded to washing machines.
In the wrong light a Bryan Day release can be a shade too much anti-music for me, refusing any form of a pleasing sound in favour of ugly textures, but here the balance is just right; grotesque noise tempered with recognisable toy pianos and odd string devices and percussive basherments, very abstract and non-specific, all produced in real time by humans flailing and floundering in strange ways. Guest vocals (groaning and chanting) from Trishant Shetty on one track. Incredible photo inside showing the duo outside a novelty gift shop, probably in Hyderabad. From 30 November 2023.