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The Henrys
Joyous Porous
$15.99
I have no way idea as to how to account for this music: it's jazz, it's American roots and blues, it's avant garde soul, it's all and none at all. Centered on the squeeks and squirls of Don Rookes slide and plucked guitars, driven by an quirky sense of ambiance by a core band of bass and drums, they are joined by an equally quirky cast of guests (Michael White, Mary Margaret O'Hara and Hugh Marsh, among others). They all contribute a closet full of sounds, from horns, kalimbas, tin pans and other household-sounding objects to old analog synthesizers: therimins and mellotrons and Arps and such from the studio basement.
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See also:
Longest Night Ensemble
Daniel Janke
Listen!
VF61
Joyous Porous
One Body
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"It's all a little ramshackle, slightly off-kilter, wheezy and rambling. One moment the song is going along as you expect it and then, quietly it's gone somewhere else, in a way that you never anticipated....Joyous Porous could be characterized as a kind of Flannery O'Conner Middle Americana. It's like watching your first spaghetti Western, when the Old West you thought you knew all of a sudden looks weirdly distorted. It evokes the haunting atmospherics of John Fahey or of Tom Waits when he uses his invented instruments to take us to some other offbeat time and place... - Ted Swedenberg, RootsWorld
" The density of the timbres allows for a kind of short-hand that suits the group's brainy, yet sensual, style." - Globe and Mail, Toronto "If you're looking for musical fellow travellers, then probably Bill Frisell or David Lindley would be your nearest points of reference, but in all honesty, this group's pretty much in a compartment of one." - fRoots (read the full review) "Among all the infectious noise being made by acoustic slide guitar players (Zubot & Dawson, Harry Manx) in recent times, Toronto kona player Don Rooke and his ensemble of like-minded abstract sound architects stand out on their fourth album as the high-minded intellectuals in their class, the quiet scientists scratching away at the borders of the folk/time continuum while the other guys are staging a hootenanny. 'Old instruments, new sounds' is the way Rooke describes what The Henrys do – they use sophisticated recording and playing techniques and elaborate audio processes to extract from a resonator guitar and other plucked acoustic instruments the harmonics, overtones and oblique noises behind the rustic notes to create landscapes that are astonishingly romantic, frightening, sexual, spiritual – and quite beautiful. Brave new music." - Toronto Star, December 2002 |
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