Andrew Weathers,
who in North Carolina had been active as a composer of droning music under the moniker Pacific Before Tiger, as documented on
the three-song EP Come Home Safe (2007)
and on the four pieces of the album
Anchors (2008), including the 16-minute In Gray and the 10-minute In Rust,
moved to California to
study electronic music at Mills College.
He fused two strands of musical skills,
namely open-tuned fingerpicking and
computer-processed acoustic sounds, on
A Great Southern City (2010), an album of computer-processed
guitar solos.
They range from the
eerie ambient music of the nine-minute Dusty Summer Ghost
to the minimal and catatonic Skin Holding Atoms In,
from the cosmic music for muffled and dilated reverbs of Right Now and Now and Now
to the aquatic waves of the nine-minute Left Arm Sunburnt with an odd last minute of free-form noise,
plus
impressionistic vignettes like First Front Porch Brooklyn.
Someone Else's Summer (2011) contains the 45-minute Someone Else's Summer,
a mutating drone that sounds like an old telephone ringtone, and
a nine-minute loop of musique concrete, Transient Summer.
One Day We'll Find the Valley (2014) is a rather confused album.
Although it seems to be anchored to a religious concept, the compositions
vary significantly in genre, from
We Will Sing With Angels There, an electronic manipulation of a church choir, to
the acoustic guitar solo Save Lord Or We Perish, from
the violent musique concrete of There Will Be No Sorrow There to
We'll Meet Beyond the Grave, an odd combination of droning instruments, glitchy synths and voice.
He played acoustic and electric guitars, banjo, vibraphone, synthesizer, organ and electronics on
I Am Happy When I Am Moving (2015), devoted to musical trance.
The opener, Ripples of Lost Echo's (6:38), a John Fahey-esque elegy,
is misleading. The critical mass of the album consists of
the Zen-like suspended atmosphere of For Peace and Harmony Free Titans (7:36),
the delicate interstellar filigree of It's OK to Be Excited (6:11),
and the rippling chords with sounds of nature of Diamond Blues (6:44).
Littlefield (2015), his first solo acoustic guitar album with no
computer processing and no electronics, contains at least two major
compositions: the
pastoral John Fahey-esque eight-minute Susquehanna River (but with a raga-like distorted droning guitar in the background)
and the catatonic blues fantasia Freetown Christiania.
Light In the Valley (2015) contains two lengthy droning compositions:
Electric Piano and Twelve String Guitar (19:12) and the dreamy
Organ and Baritone Guitar (18:13).
Rock & Roll Can And Will Heal Us (2016) collects
rather static and trivial synth-based ambient music.
The celestial pace of You Can Haunt Anything Yourself if You Try Hard Enough is the least tedious but the fat tones of his synth are hardly the right
vehicle for that idea.
Mojave Between Ludlow And Needles (2016) contains two
ghostly guitar compositions, Ocotillo Band and
Saguaro Band, that rank among his most inspired, but also a lot
of filler that feels like leftovers.
Under the Tree (2017) was conceived as the soundtrack for a documentary.
He did better with
the Andrew Weathers Ensemble, a large group of improvisers
(saxophone, fiddle, koto, violin, melordion, cello, concertina, harmonica,
vibraphone, clarinet, vocals, computer, etc) who recorded a trilogy
of free-folk albums: We're not Cautious (2011),
which includes To Ozona (11:01) and
To Burn Yourself Completely (12:29),
performed by the original eight-people line-up
(alto sax, vocals flute, guitar, cello, violin, clarinet and Weathers on electronics, percussion, guitar, banjo and organ),
What Happens When We Stop (2013), performed by a 16-musician unit and
containing Southpaw Motherfucker, and
Fuck Everybody - You Can Do Anything (2015), containing
Live By Golden Rule - Go Orange Be Strong
and especially the drunk choir We Will Never See A Cloud Again (perhaps their all-time zenith).
The experiment was continued on
Build A Mountain Where Our Bodies Fall (2017), with the ensemble now numbering 18 musicians. The sound is generally more psychedelic, notably in the
invocations of I Am Left Buried Where I've Been (7:56) and
especially The Light Pulse Earth Grid is a Channel (8:26), with its
noisy coda,
while We Already Exist Forever (We Will Eat) (7:26) is some sort of
surreal country-rock.
In 2017 he moved from Oakland to a small town in West Texas.
AW Solo Album (2020) is dedicated to "occupied Comanche Land" but only
Organ Needle (one of his best) recreates the mysterious atmosphere of the desert.
Another attempt at capturing the essence of his natural landscape was
Dreams and Visions from the Llano Estacado (2020), again scored for
synth and guitar, but only the
minimalist repetition of Salt Permeable Earth stands out.
Two Loud Rooms (2020) contains two more ambitious compositions:
Carl Making Coffee with Guitar and Text (25:11), a collage of
manipulated field recordings and of guitar distortion (rather childish
musique concrete) and
Silo Music (27:40), a more intriguing piece of electroacoustic
chamber music that opens with cryptic percussive sounds and ends with
sinister drones and voices.
The Andrew Weathers Ensemble, now numbering 16 musicians, returned with the four compositions of The Thousand Birds in the Earth The Thousand Birds in the Sky (2020),
which includes two of their most cohesive improvisations:
the stately free-jazz mantra of A Mountain of Snakes - The High Plains - A Knee in the Earth (9:30),
and the acid-tinged invocation and fragile chaos of An Unkindness of Ravens (11:11).
Catalogs - Sound Pieces With Text And 10 Unrealized Scores (2021)
contains four colossal compositions for computer-processed
field recordings, synths and spoken-word:
Spring Spring, Edge of the Llano (15:00),
Bend (40:03),
Incomplete Dream Journal (2016-2020) (25:30) and
Cactus Hum Mesa (23:10).
Weathers also released several collaboration albums with Seth Chrisman.
Wind Tide was a duo with his wife Gretchen Korsmo.
Sciatic Assemblage (2022) contains
The Interior Is a Field (20:00), which feels like distorted county-fair music,
and a rather surreal
AW Heats Up a TV Dinner with Guitar and Other Sounds (19:41).
Sage Suddenly (2023) contains just one 80-minute composition, which is
probably 50 minutes too long but whose fusion of natural sounds (birds) and cacophony actually works better than in most of his past ones.
