Disfarmer, Bill Frisell's latest Nonesuch release, is due out a week from today you can now listen to the complete album online for NPR's Exclusive First Listen. NPR describes Frisell as "a guitar tactician with warmth and a composer of unclassifiable songs," and, on this album (inspired by the work of the late photographer Michael Disfarmer), "the quiet tactician of the electric guitar, who engineers loops and subtle distortions with phrasing you never knew you were expecting." NPR concludes: "It's a record alternately spare and full, languid and rollicking, pastoral and urbanely produced."
Disfarmer, Bill Frisell's latest Nonesuch release, is due out a week from today, and for the next week, you can listen to the album in its entirety online for NPR's Exclusive First Listen. NPR describes Frisell as "a guitar tactician with warmth and a composer of unclassifiable songs."
The late Michael Disfarmer, who gives the new album its title, was a curmudgeonly character in rural Arkansas, who, despite his anti-social character, chose to record the stark images of his fellow townspeople, during the 1940s and '50s, in black-and-white photo portraits. Frisell has now set the images to music, joined by lap steel guitarist Greg Leisz, violinist Jenny Scheinman, and bassist Viktor Krauss for this recording of original Frisell tunes and interpolations of songs by the likes of Hank Williams Sr.
NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon, in his introduction to the Exclusive First Listen, calls the man at the record's helm "the quiet tactician of the electric guitar, who engineers loops and subtle distortions with phrasing you never knew you were expecting."
Jarenwattananon goes on to describe the work this way:
There are evocative original themes and motifs here, surrounded by backgrounds sounding distant echoes of country, bluegrass and old-time mountain music. There's also a handful of carefully selected covers ... It's a record alternately spare and full, languid and rollicking, pastoral and urbanely produced.
Read more and listen to Disfarmer now at npr.org.
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The Independent finds the connection between these two artists, photographer and musician, across media, with reviewer Nick Coleman writing of the tracks on this "exquisite" album that "all are meticulously exposed, like monochrome images on silver paper. The review can be found at independent.co.uk.
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