M.A. Dinkins, "Guitar Realtime Processing"
Recently I was lying on a very comfortable couch in a quiet house. For a couple of hours I was mostly asleep or in a semi-conscious dreamstate. Later I discovered that in a room nearby was a cat who had infrequently remembered that it wanted to get out and engaged in brief episodes of door-rattling. Listening to this record is very like that experience: peaceful, hypnotic, slightly disturbing, repetitive, flawed, transporting.
The three untitled pieces on Guitar Realtime Processing offer a sense of mesmeric stilless and vague movement. As with Eno's Oblique Strategies to some extent, and his ambient systems in particular, more might be gained by discarding the usual preconception of how to proceed; by not actively listening. This is sound as shifting and surrounding as fog, yet with an odd emotional impact. In terms of direction or coaxing, there's little to follow. Something approaching constant change and insubstantial permanence emerges. It is the audio equivalent of a rarely visited brook, or (as in Murakami's South Of The Border, West Of The Sun) of "rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it."
Dinkins, a former resident of Shreveport, also records as Unguent. The history of music in Shreveport gives no clues to the sound of this record, however. Leadbelly favored the twelve-string, and was from Shreveport and although new evidence suggest they might be from Slidell, The Residents still claim Shreveport as their site of origin, before—like Dinkins—a relocation to California. On a map of sound, the location of Guitar Realtime Processing is closer to the least tuneful aspects of Budd & Partridge's Through The Hill. While these sketches lack the austere depth of such contemplative works as Nils Okland's Bris, it's similarly a record in which to get lost, and American Routes be damned.
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