Tarentel, the project of
Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Danny Grodinski,
is a San Francisco-based experiment in instrumental music.
Originally a four-piece ensemble, they debuted with a double-length 75-minute
album that contained only five compositions.
From Bone To Satellite (Temporary Residence, 1999) is a magnificent
plateau of desolate, dilated, arpeggiated, minor-key, synth & guitar,
instrumental post-rock scores a` la
Godspeed You Black Emperor.
The album contains five lengthy compositions.
The 11-minute Steede Bonnet and the 12-minute
When We Almost Killed Ourselves ebb and flow,
but mainly drift, weaving textures of irrational mathematics.
The former takes shape slowly from a quivering guitar, releasing
a "Morriconian" twang against a mellow, languid, Pink Floyd-ian backdrop.
The latter mutates from prog-rock fury to ambient tinkling.
The 17-minute Ursa Minor Ursa Major exploits tiny events to produce
gigantic waves of sound. The inferno abruptly fades away and a gentle strumming
introduces to a majestic Pink Floyd-ian melody.
It takes about seven minutes of its 21 minutes for Carl Sagan to
reveal a melodic theme. Once it appears, it gets refined over and over again
through ever more intricate counterpoint and more forceful drumming. Again,
it turns into a thundering crescendo, but this time the ending is a
cosmic radiation that glides away for about five minutes.
The 11-minute closer, Strange Attractors, is unusual in that the
melodic theme is present from the very beginning, so most of the song is
actually occupied with the disintegration, rather than the construction,
of the structure (albeit with a sudden outburst of space-rock jamming).
With the line-up paired down to only Trevor Montgomery and Jeff Rosenberg,
but a huge cast of session-men playing everything from
strings to horns to accordion, Tarentel recorded
The Order of Things (Neurot, 2001).
A more humane feeling surfaced from the stark, carefree solemnity of
Tarentel's six new compositions (actually four, because two were very brief
interludes).
The eleven-minute Adonai is grounded in a infinite pattern of guitars, with a gentle trumpet phrase hovering above it. After seven minutes, the guitars disappear, replaced by an electronic breeze that slowly changes timbre. If the beginning of the piece was reticent, the ending is enigmatic to say the least.
The twelve-minute Ghosty Head layers a fragile female voice over slowly-dripping piano notes. After six minutes the piano disappears, and the voice is lfet to fend for itself in a suddenly hostile electronic environment. The piano fades in and out, and the initial sense of safety is broken forever.
The 14-minute Death In The Mind Of The Living is made of only electronic
droning for nine minutes. As usual, the drone is continuously transforming,
in this case moving from a harmless process of tone exploration to a
threatening sense of impending disaster. After nine minutes, it briefly
reveals its true essence: sustained notes by the stringed instruments. Then
the drone reappears, and it grows in both intensity and dissonance.
Much more lively is the seven-minute Popol Vuh, the closest thing to
a regular rock song, in which a veil of sustained, slowly mutating string
drones sketches a melody that the drums propel to a crescendo of sort.
The other track with drums, the eight-minute Blessed/ Cursed,
does not use them for fueling the process but for mere decoration. The
funereal horns, the electronic bubbles, the guitar glissandoes and
the ghostly voices that compete for attention are independent of the tempo.
After four minutes, the music dies and then resurrects as a fragmented guitar
lullaby.
The frustrating element of Tarentel's trancey music is that the piece
often ends without ending. A logical pattern ends, and something else starts
within the same piece. The effect is not so much disorienting as amateurish,
and, ultimately, simply spoils the atmosphere that has been patiently created.
Ephemera (Temporary Residence, 2002) collects five rarities, including
the epic-length EP Looking for Things Searching for Things/
Searching for Things (Resonant).
The 15-minute Waltz is one of their typical crescendos, but it layers
reverb after reverb until there is only huge drone left to drift away.
The 15-minutes Looking For Things opens with one of their most
radio-friendly tunes, which gets slowly decomposed and eventually leads to a
catastrophic crescendo and to a catastrophic disintegration (a four-minute
coda of subsonic noises).
The 24-minute monolith Searching for Things is adrift in warm guitar
tones for abut five minutes, but then, propelled by steady drumming,
a lazy, languid melody rises that slowly turns into a majestic hymn.
The last nine minutes, again, are but a nebula of tiny noises.
Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplaat, 2002) is a live 1998 performance.
Tarentel guitarist Jefre Cantu has also released an EP of
digital soundscapes,
Spring (Dreams By Degrees, 2002), under the moniker Colophon.
Trevor Montgomery also launched the project Lazarus with his
Songs For An Unborn Sun (Temporary Residence, 2003), that also features
Marty Anderson of Dilute.
Tarentel's bassist Kenseth Thibideau (also in Rumah Sakit and Thingy) formed
Howard Hello with Dilute's guitarist Marty Anderson and
Court and Spark's vocalist Wendy Allen, thus a percussion-less trio.
The seven-song album Howard Hello (Temporary Residence, 2002)
concocted an original synthesis of distant elements such as
psychological depth, open-ended dynamics, electronic sculpting,
acoustic guitar fingerpicking, irregular time signatures, dissonant events,
minimal arrangements.
The focus was on post-folk numbers such as Television and Prozac,
that articulated a strategy of non-linear development.
If that was a post-industrial variation on John Fahey's primitivism,
the disorienting ambience of Belief, Dream and America
sounded like a post-nuclear variation on Brian Eno's futurism.
And the atonal dirge Revolution bridged the two worlds.
Don't Drink His Blood (Temporary Residence, 2003) is more straightforward
work that invests in lush electronic textures and ends up sounding like a
close relative of Brian Eno's alienated pop muzak
(False Hope, Giving Up, My Friend, The Parasite).
We Move Through Weather (Temporary Residence, 2004) is a mixed bag.
The combo has largely abandoned any ambition to rationalize its sound, but
the free format that ensued tends to be self-reflective even when it is meant
to be breezy and pneumatic (Hello We Move Through Weather, Get Away From Me You Clouds Of Doom).
On the other hand, the 15-minute A Cloud No Bigger Than a Man's Hand does
provide an adequate account for the limits of counterpoint and harmonic
development, that complements the music the same way a treatise on music
does.
The four song EP Paper White (Temporary Residence, 2005)
and the 43-minute mini-album
Big Black Square (Temporary Residence, 2005)
contain improvised material that was left out of We Move Through Weather.
The EP Ghost Weight (Acuarela, 2005) is sweet, velvety and transparent as their best work, bordering on a supernatural dimension.
The 30-minute nine-song Home Ruckus (Root Strata, 2005) is a study
in counterpoint, juxtaposition and improvisation that straddles the border
between rock, jazz and ambient music.
Live Edits Natoma (Root Strata, 2006) documents a live performance.
The double-CD
Ghetto Beats On The Surface Of The Sun (The Music Fellowship, 2006 -
Temporary Residence, 2007)
is
a four-volume series that collects music recorded between
september 2004 and april 2005. The most common paradigm of these pieces if a
skeletal rhythms piercing through a jelly of glitchy ambience.
Their "ghetto" is a psycho-musical ghetto, a mythological "place" of the mind
that manifests itself in different guises:
the 16-minute disorienting soundscape of All things Vibrations on the first volume,
the 16-minute motorik nightmare of Sun Place on the second volume,
the ten-minute Stellar Envelope on the third volume, a propulsive Hawkwind-ish space-rock jam,
and the droning Earth-like doom-metal Somebody Fucks With Everybody on the fourth volume.
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