Had the pleasure of a few days visit from Team Evan & Woody, roving Seattle musical tag-team.

In between playing a ridiculous amount of music with everyone we met, we stopped into Origami Vinyl and made some financially-ill-advised-but-aesthetically-sound purchases.

Evan picked up a new record by Tortoise (perhaps “Beacons Of Ancestorship”?). I chose “The Freak Of Araby” by Sir Richard Bishop, his first solo record to include musicians other than Sir himself.

(Woody abstained from purchasing. Way to buck the culture!)

We started with Mr Bishop, whose tones are thick and mystic chops formidable. The first track is a lengthy unaccompanied rumination for middle-east-inflected electric guitar, featuring round, warm, diamond-edged tone that is just about everything I could want in a recorded guitar sound.

The band kicks on track 2, and from there on the songs are long and they groove mightily. Think about something between Medeski Martin & Wood’s “Shack-Man” and Marc Ribot’s 2nd Los Cubanos Postizos, “Muy Divertido” … but it is nothing like either of those, really. They are the closest reference points I can think of just now.

It was a brain-cleansing listen, from the beginning of side A straight to the droning, Joujouka-escent closing track on side B.

Then we threw the Tortoise platter on the table and basked in a whole big pile of oddly electronic sounding instrumental grooves for bass, drums, keys, and occasional sips of guitar, all of which was recorded PERFECTLY, the tones so big and round and warm that it could perhaps have been done on a 4-track. You could call that kind of sound “hi-fi lo-fi”. Totally amazing record.

We capped it with a listen to the “West Coast Post-Asiatic Sampler” record, vinyl edition. We were so caught up with examining the truly lovely multi-colored record itself that we failed to navigate the side-selection issue properly and listened to side 2 first. (Not that sides are anything like plainly marked on this release). But I think it was OK, and supplied a properly weird vibe to the end of the evening.

BTW:

A few nights later I stayed up with Woody listening to Tim Buckley’s “Blue Afternoon” and “Happy/Sad” records. I esteem “Blue Afternoon” highly in a wide array of ways, and although I have been intensely fond of “Happy/Sad” for years, I have generally thought of it as a gem made perfect by its very flaws.

Opinion revised. “Happy/Sad” is a perfect album. Period.