Chris Corsano - The Key (Became the Important Thing [and Then Just Faded Away])

Format: LP
Catalogue No.: DC902
Barcode: 0781484090212
Release Date: 28 Jun 2024
Genre: Post Rock/Experimental

 Drummer Chris Corsano is a tireless collaborator. Among the 150 or so albums that he’s contributed to over the past 25 years, only six have been credited to Chris alone, which makes the existence of ‘The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away])’ a rare instance of Chris going deep on his own vision. Indeed, this album finds him involved in every aspect of the process, from making the string-drums that the music is based upon, to playing all parts of the music, mixing them, and doing the cover art, too.
 This is a special album, bringing his encompassing focus on free improvisation and noise into a granular fusion with acoustic experiments and ideations of hard rock riffing and the post-punk sound. In Chris Corsano’s collaborations over time with Paul Flaherty, Joe McPhee, Dredd Foole, Michael Flower, Paul Dunmall, Bill Orcutt, Nate Wooley, Mette Rasmussen, C. Spencer Yeh, Ben Chasny and Sir Richard Bishop (as individuals, and together as Rangda), Bill Nace, Wally Shoup, Evan Parker and dozens of other players, it’s clear the vibe may get intense / heavy / out. Accessing this place, in itself, is an incredible calling, but on ‘The Key (Became The Important Thing [& Then Just Faded Away])’, the intensity radiates entirely from inside Chris’s process, in conversation with himself. And that’s something that hit a bit different once he was done making it.
 The pieces here were largely built out of Chris’s string drum playing, utilizing a setup he’s created involving a silicone string, stretched across a snare drum with a bridge. When the string is hit, it resonates the drum - a conception similar to that of the banjo, but with more of a bass tone. Several songs focus on Chris playing a bass string drum with a full kit, while the basic parts of two other pieces (‘I Don’t Have Missions’, ‘The Full-Measure Wash Down’) implied possibilities for full band arrangements which Chris was compelled to respond to himself. This isn’t the first time he’s made overdubbed music, Corsano-on-Corsano style but it did have the effect of feeling unusually personal. 
 The process of exploration and discovery uniquely informed and shaped the music, implying not just sounds and passages, but structures of songs themselves. In addition to the several synapse-clearing full-band arrangements, Chris’s solo drumkit performances with the bass string drum take flight, the shape of their movement based on interaction with its marvellous acoustics. Further, Chris’s guitar playing on ‘I Don’t Have Missions’, a semi-unconscious attempt to Frankenstein together the influences of several of his six-string collaborators, locates a new awesome space in his music facilitated through and furthering the sounds found playing the string drum.

Tracklisting
I Don’t Have Missions 
Collapsed in Four Parts
Low Experience 
Unlike An Empty Box
The Full-Measure Wash Down
Everything I Tried To Understand Wasn’t Understandable at All