Starting out as a kid who picked up the guitar after battling cancer, Portland Oregon’s Ryan A. Miller has long favored unconventional paths for advancing his craft. He sought out alternate techniques and seriously studied composition, as well as recording and production methods. All of that has clearly gone into the making his album just released on Bandcamp, Atrophy Torque Fly.
Miller spends much of his time composing and performing for the trio U Sco, but he’s put out a solo project before: Hex Fortunes (2011) was a single song suite broken up into four parts and lasting less than half an hour. Atrophy Torque Fly is nine discreet ideas that Miller would hash out over the next seven years. Though he ‘settles’ for a more normal nine-song fare running at a normal album length, there’s really not much else normal about it. Miller’s a true original, who goes all in on angular lines, through-composing, avant-prog progressions and improvisational fury with equal heaping helpings. Listening to each of these tracks is like taking a swift ride full of whiplash-inducing sharp turns, where the jerky rhythms become the key part of the harmonics.
The closest thing Atrophy Torque Fly sounds like is that band Robert Fripp heads up and “Heart Leaks” is indeed like a chopped up latter-day King Crimson, adapting its taut, dense concepts and making it more so. The titular “Atrophy Torque Fly” is also KC-like for the first couple of minutes, then lurches into a circular riff with mechanical cadence. Other such riffs follow to obliterate any sense of predictability.
Miller dubs in multiple guitars and precision sampling to the impossibly labyrinth “Often Escaping Owl,” making it resemble noise rock with a trigonometric structure, and Noah Bernstein’s sax is unlikely but quite effective unison partner. “Hiding Is Everything” on the other hand is uber-tight coaction with drummer Phillip Cleary.
Even if you can get used to that kind of uncommonly thick and math-y patterns, there are other songs that assault dullness in other ways. The electronica-heavy “Only Ever” is avant-garde Atari music. On “Wax Fang,” Miller takes slide guitar into an alien terrain, followed by the effect of sliding across the radio dial where everything on the radio is experimental rock. “Braided Ring” is culled from a live performance in 2013, and Miller is leaving no sonic void as he makes roaring industrial drone come out of his guitar. “Oblossom” is a strange mixture of chimes and distortion, a cacophony compelling in its peculiarity.
It’s not all that hard to be different, but different with a purpose and a lot of contemplation and musicianship behind it is almost always a rare treat. Ryan A. Miller’s Atrophy Torque Fly thrives in its uniqueness.
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