Making breakfast with Vinny's music can cause the toast to taste different. Taking a nap with Vinny's music can engender wonderful dreams. Watching the news with Vinny's music can make it gain unexpected meaning. Folding the laundry with Vinny's music can bring new appreciation for that old T-shirt.
Since the SECOND of Vinny Golia's three-part "Even to This Day" opus lasts some 12 hours over 110 tracks, multitasking is required for at least some of it. Conceived with electronics and Cypriot guitarist Alkis Nicholadis in mind, it often raises comparisons of dentist drills, sonar sweeps or sci-fi soundtracks. But just as often, it impels us into the physical world of Golia's counterrhythmic modernism, where we imagine tortoise races, Chaplin trots or hand-to-hand combat. And the instruments, pairings and moods are changing, changing all the time.
Although certain themes recur, "Syncretism" doesn't present as an extremely long composition, but more as a collection of ideas that Golia explored while he was thinking along a certain line. The process involved written material plus improvisational interactions with many of his regular collaborators, including guitarist Nels Cline, keyboardist Wayne Peet, electronic manipulator Steuart Liebig, guitarist G.E. Stinson, guitarist Alex Noice, guitarist Henry Kaiser, trumpeter Dan Rosenboom and singer Will Salmon. These people all know one another, and it shows.
This listener got through two-thirds of "Syncretism" before writing, and every selection at least made paying bills or answering email more enjoyable. But some moments were breathtaking. The 14-minute "Sleight of Hand," highlighted by the elevational drumming of Tim Feeney, felt like a kiss behind the threat of meltdown. The three tracks starting with the 12-minute "Tell Me Howard" traveled to places of deep-space disorientation that could make a man seize a table leg. And the mini-suite of "Watching Watching Waiting Waiting" and the succeeding three numbers were a mind exposition -- from an elusive spacecraft, to orchestral grandeur, to gong & slide, to the Russian menace. Golia blows his many winds in fury, in peace, and sometimes just as another overtone in the layers of community he has collected.
Community is what "Syncretism" is all about. Golia hopes that when a few of us listen linked but unchained, waves will spread. If prodigies such as this music can happen, most anything can.
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Listen/buy here.
Read MetalJazz's encounter with Movement One here.