Improvising guitarists are a breed apart and inevitably it seems they want to just sit down with another improvising guitarist and jam. Just a couple of years ago, Elliott Sharp convened with Mary Halvorson and Marc Ribot with astonishingly good results for Err Guitar and the late, great Derek Bailey had invariably found himself in duets with Eugene Chadbourne and Henry Kaiser. Now there is such a record from two fast-rising stars of the current crop of accomplished avant-garde guitar maestros, Wendy Eisenberg (Birthing Hips) and Shane Parish (Ahleuchatistas).
Their collaboration, Nervous Systems (Verses Records), actually calls to mind a memorable 1999 encounter between Chadbourne and Kaiser, The Guitar Lesson, where it’s just two masters kicking back on standard-tuned acoustic guitars and reacting to other’s whims. Recorded around a single microphone with no apparent edits and banging out seven songs composed on the spot, the primitive recording setup of Nervous Systems only bolsters its potency.
Though it’s doubtful either had gone into this thinking about what type of music would result, my best description of it is ‘experimental fingerpicking.’ And like all successful such collaborations, the two come up with a unified sound while being themselves. If you listen carefully enough to “Fresh Bust,” as an example, you can pick up on Parish’s folk leanings and Eisenberg’s dauntless asides (especially at the end). “What Have I Broken Through?” runs through a rapid succession on unpredictable chord changes that they charge through together and manage to not fall off that tight rope in spite of an ‘anything goes’ state of mind.
But everywhere you hear on this record, there is strong rapport whether one is playing full chords or single line notes, dissonant or harmonious, or leading versus following. And here’s the kicker in all this that probably no other freeform guitar summit meeting can claim: Eisenberg and Parish had first met only hours before these recordings. That’s instantaneous chemistry, folks.
Nervous Systems will release on March 22 2019 by way of Bandcamp.
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