scott tuma

Dandelion (Limited Vinyl Edition)

*Another highly anticipated limited vinyl pressing from the excellent Digitalis imprint - this time from Boxhead Ensemble's Scott Tuma who manages to weave a sound that incorporates dense and unsettling field recordings with Takoma-esque porchside strums, wiry violin, rhythmic metal scrapes, music-box interludes, spectral banjo plucks and distant piano sequences. 400 copies only for the world* Dandelion' arrives with no small amount of anticipation. The first thing we hear is the exaggerated whirr of phased tape treatments opening up to expose beautiful, disjointed music box chimes that carve out a mysterious, nocturnal path through 'San Luis Free 2E'. This short piece gives way to the similarly fleeting 'Old Woman', another miniature populated by wiry violin and rhythmic metal scrapes. It's only by the time 'Red Roses For Me' comes around that we're really permitted enough breathing space to fully cast ourselves into Tuma's universe. Here, layered field recordings underscore spectral banjo plucks, distant piano sequences, and eventually, a folksy accordion melody. It's this kind of fragmented, displaced approach to acoustic music that best represents Tuma's craft, whisking him far away from comparisons to the legions of Fahey-ites out there and other such contemporary exponents of Americana. 'Again And Again' marks another highlight, sculpting a nebula of airy guitar twangs and manipulated drone vapours. By this point the album seems to be converging on more fully-formed, song-like arrangements, all of which leads us up to 'Hope Jones (Jason's Song)', where we hear a voice rising from the ghost-country stillness. All this invites a moment of outright spine-tingling beauty before 'Free Dirt' limbers up to shred your nerves in the most exhilarating fashion, offering considerably more visceral pleasures with its bowed metal percussion, howling feedback and dissolved room sounds. The closing couplet of 'True History' and 'The Roses Are Red' deliver some sort of catharsis - the former dispensing glorious reverberant blues while the latter finds Tuma's guitar achieving a kind of weightlessness, floating off into the atmosphere in a fashion that's halfway between Loren Connors and The Durutti Column. Sublime.