Terminal Analog
A note from Jason Kahn…
I arrived in Melbourne on October 16, 2023 after a fairly intense six weeks of touring through Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Dave came to pick me up at Tullamarine. Our plan was to play shows in Bendigo, Canberra and Melbourne, with a couple of free days factored in to record at his place in Brunswick West. However, at this point I wasn’t thinking of any of this. I just wanted to lay down and decompress for a while. Tomorrow would be our first show at The Make It Up Club.
I think the first time I heard Dave play was in 2001 at the Festival Densités in France, where I was also on the bill with Günter Müller and Norbert Möslang. Dave was there with his trio Pateras / Baxter / Brown. I only caught their sound check, and I don’t think Dave and I even met. But after this our paths seemed to invariably cross at various festivals in Australia — the NOW now, Liquid Architecture, Avantwhatever. At one point I crashed at his house on one of my repeated jaunts through Asia and the Antipodes. By 2012 I’d worked up the chutzpah to ask Dave to play and record with my trio Tetras, which was on a tour through Australia. Unfortunately, this group soon fizzled out afterwards. But Dave and I kept in touch.
In 2020, from the depths of Melbourne’s seemingly endless Covid lockdown, Dave sent me a new LP of pieces he’d composed for a couple of operettas. The music was nothing like I’d heard from Dave before. Not only was he singing, but his guitar playing especially intrigued me. A kind of atmospherically plangent sound played on an acoustic tenor guitar in open tuning. I began to wonder how this could work with my shattered and erratic electronics playing.
In 2022, with Covid slowly beginning to recede, I resolved to start planning for a tour through Asia and Australia again. This finally came together in the fall of 2023, and our string of shows was a part of this. We played our first gig as a duo on October 17 at the Make It Up Club. It felt good to be back but also more than a bit strange without Sean Baxter’s inimitable presence. Our set turned out to resemble something like a gargantuan wave of blistering sound. Here was a side of Dave I hadn’t heard before. We’d had a recording session at Dave’s house before the gig, but it resembled nothing of these proportions.
I had the next two days off and spent the time wandering around Dave’s neighborhood and sampling the local Lebanese restaurants. In the evening Dave and Leanne would get home from work. At some point we would all coalesce around the kitchen table to partake of Leanne’s culinary artistry and sample some very good wine. A recording session would then follow in Dave’s back room. There wasn’t much discussion as to what we were going to be doing. We just sat down and played. Having blown out all the steam from our system at the first gig, we were now able to take more time to explore a deeper sense of space and pacing.
After these relatively languid two days, the three of us set off on a road trip through the wilds of Australia. Our first stop was the Victorian gold rush town of Bendigo, where I’d played many years ago as part of the Liquid Architecture Festival road trip. We had dinner in the 19th century town hall, turned in another rousing set at Trash Cult and slept in a seedy motel worthy of any road trip. Early the next day, we headed out for the long drive to Canberra with a brief stop at one of Australia’s many historic Greek cafe’s. Richard Johnson, SoundOut’s indefatigable promoter of all musics uncategorizable in Canberra, welcomed us at the Drill Hall Gallery.
Our schedule had drastically compressed. We quickly set up, had something to drink then played another great set to a sparse but intensely listening crowd. Memories and words and the sounds here are all that’s left. Hopefully there will be more to come.
credits
Dave Brown – tenor guitar
Jason Kahn – electronics
Recorded October 17-19, 2023 in Melbourne by Jason Kahn.
Mix and cover art by Jason Kahn.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space
Thank you to Leanne McLean, Room40, Pro Helvetia, Popkredit / Arts Council of Zürich, Fondation SUISA and the Schweizerische Interpretenstiftung SIS for making Jason Kahn’s travel and stay in Australia financially possible.