(2021) Rob Noyes - Arc Minutes
Review:
Mastering the 12-string guitar is all about the overtones. With each string doubled, even the most economical strike elicits multiple timbres and tonalities. A strum or rapid-fire picking pattern can raise a cloud of glittering sonic dust, iridescent and beautiful but with a tendency towards murk. The difficulty comes in balancing the 12-string’s shimmering indeterminancy with clarity, not too much of one or the other. Rob Noyes, a 12-string guitarist of prodigious skill, finds the mean between mystery and melody, sculpting sympathetic vibrations into glimmering backdrops for folk blues tunes. Listen for instance, to the way that the rapid, percussive picking of “Vout” melts and wavers, the hard strike of pick on string shifting as it resonates, shadowed by ghostly images. And yet, even the most frenetic, string-slamming passages have a cool lucidity; it is easy to follow the song’s main line even shrouded as it is by a luminous miasma of sound. Noyes is a follower of Leo Kottke, pursuing the same clarity and control as the master, even as his hands move at blur speed over the strings. Yet for every lighting quick, lush, orchestral “Sniper’s Dream” or “Tackbeater,” there’s a slow, pristine ballad, like “Pishamare,” whose stately dignity is undergirded by the plainest sort of rhythmic picking. To borrow a phrase from the Quakers, “It’s a gift to be simple”— and, they might add, not as easy as it looks. Elsewhere, as on “Old Devils,” Noyes plays with form, executing intricate melodic figures with casual aplomb, beginning in a very traditional-sounding blues form and pushing at it, shifting keys and tempos. It’s a measure of his skill that the difficulty dissolves into pure musical sensation. You don’t think about how hard he’s working, only about how quick and pretty and clean the song is. In another instance of how contrary life can be, the song that I could live in is just over one minute long. It’s called “And How,” and it is at once sunny and contemplative, with flurries of picking that suddenly resolve in hanging bent notes. It feels like the inside of a pleasant mental wander, with light coming in the window and nothing very pressing on the calendar. Noyes creates a complete little musical world in the time it takes to heat up coffee, its architecture clear but surrounded with a little mystery.
Track Listing:
01 - Cheap Gold
02 - Pishamares
03 - How and Wither
04 - Magic On Television
05 - Vout
06 - Animal Grief
07 - The Sniper's Dream
08 - Invisible Ridicule
09 - Dwelling
10 - Old Devils
11 - Tackbeater
12 - And How
13 - Absolutely Still
Media Report:
Genre: acoustic, alternative folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits