Prior to hearing Golden Retriever, the idea of a bass clarinet/modular synthesizer duo would have seemed uniquely terrible to me.  That initial prejudice was not entirely wrong, as Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson can be a rather tough ride during their wilder improvisations, but this 2010 release is pretty spectacular and faultless.  As improbable as such a thing may seem, Golden Retriever have found the magic place where Tangerine Dream, impressionist classical, and free jazz influences can all seamlessly coexist and cohere into something wonderful and new.
Jonathan Sielaff and Matt Carlson crossed paths many times before the formation of Golden Retriever, as they are both very active in Portland, Oregon's thriving improv scene and have played together in a number of different incarnations, the most notable of which is probably Parenthetical Girls.  At some point, they realized that their solo projects were both heading in much the same direction and decided to join forces.  That shared background is enormously important, as both musicians prove themselves to be skilled improvisors and interact with each other quite comfortably and inventively, creating incredibly dense and shifting dronescapes without ever encroaching on each other's space.
Equally noteworthy, of course, is the unique instrumentation. Synthesizers, in general, aren't especially rare, but modular synths are fairly unusual in contexts this melodic.  Aside from providing Matt Carlson with a very "vintage space music" sound (with some able assistance from an Echoplex), his heavily customized set-up also enables him to vibrantly tweak and warp sounds and wave shapes as much as his heart desires. As for Sielaff, I can't think of anyone else that plays a contact-mic'd bass clarinet through an arsenal of pedals.  It's a bizarrely attention-grabbing and complimentary combination of textures.
The bulk of this five-song release is very drone-centric, but it is a much more fluid and melodic strain of drone than most: once Matt and Jonathan have a sufficiently dense bed of loops beneath them, they are both free (and eager) to color and shape the piece's progression with their improvisations.  Sielaff and his clarinet generally take the melodic foreground and he turns out to be a pretty amazing soloist, languidly unfolding surprisingly dark and poignant melodies over Carlson's thick buzzing and burbling.  I don't think this could work at all if anyone in Golden Retriever was less than an amazing musician, as such a template could be extremely limiting and tiresome in less capable hands.  However, Matt and Jonathan both seem to have incredible intuitive understandings of dynamics, harmonies, tension, and pacing: pieces intelligently ebb and flow, queasy dissonances form and dissipate, darkly throbbing arpeggios create a feeling of motion and urgency...these guys don't miss a single trick.  The worst thing that I can possibly say about this is that 42 minutes is a bit overwhelming.  While a few songs stand out as a bit better than the rest ("False Entry" and "Canonic Horizon"), this is basically a singular and virtuosic tour de force from the first note to the last.
Samples:
 
 
Read More
