"I call it ‘the Shadow Pattern Vignette’. A fragmentary and pleasingly non-discriminatory exercise in audio capture which, when sequenced, compiled or arranged alongside other such vignettes, leads to the finished work of Nate Ivanco’s Shadow Pattern. You can reach into the hermetic depths of his Hamilton Tapes micro label, recent transatlantic appearances via Infant Tree, Chocolate Monk or adhuman, or indeed, this new LP ‘Live at Somewhere’ and find the Shadow Pattern Vignette. Forever in evidence as the clear constituent part from which the whole is always produced.
Such a method is easily described by the oft-applied generalism ‘sound collage’, however, there is rawness; a purity, an essence to Ivanco’s intuitive vocabulary that situates his material beyond what that term evokes for me. Instead, I sense an internal logic to the Shadow Pattern Vignette that operates within an almost conventional tradition of bedroom music-making; saturated with ‘hit record and play’ homespun liveness that endures whatever the final form of the resulting session. No surprise then that ‘Live at Somewhere’ was birthed from studio renditions of material either performed in real time or developed for live performance, with significant quantities of their 12-inch real estate committed to the long-form fleshing out of tonally inclined instrument-based pieces.
Side A’s workout for poorly dubbed guitar and pipe lurches from modes of fluttering mulch and coughing electronic intervention to freer states of pure playback; settling into a lulling wash of harmonics, hiss and scrape. Likewise, Side B’s sniffin’, gruntin’, fourth-wall-shatterin’ take on the pianoforte spends ample minutes letting the tinkling ivories speak for themselves. By the time the sound of moaning ferric via strained capstans and quivering belts makes its reappearance, the listener is struck by how finely its timbres mesh with an auditory context equally prizing the rattle of frame or squeak of stool amidst the hammering of notes and chords. Both pieces are rich with detail and unpredictable turns of event, yet the atmosphere of the work taken in its entirety is where the music feels familiar and trademark to the project.
Does ‘Live at Somewhere’ push the inherent musicality of Ivanco’s language further to the fore? Or is such evolution baked into the Shadow Pattern Vignette? Perhaps this is the sound of Nate rising to the occasion of his first outing on mass-produced wax via Discreet – a label known for its championing of the murky and melodic? Is any of this true for Nate or just my pontificating ass fulfilling a writing brief? I’m several listens in and all I know for sure is that I love this record and keep wanting to hear it again. In summary: inherently playable DIY home taping FFO: Spoils & Relics, Graham Lambkin’s ‘Aphorisms’, ’00s Midwestern basements, Afvikling Kassetter, Guinness."
