Chris Schlarb

Twilight & Ghost Stories

Asthmatic Kitty

originally published December 5, 2007

Fans of improvised and experimental music know Chris Schlarb as a guitarist in jazz groups like Create (!) and I Heart Lung and as the man behind the eclectic Sounds Are Active label. But in Twilight & Ghost Stories, his first solo album, Schlarb turns his soul, rather than his instrument, inside out. (The album’s story begins in February 2003. Divorced, estranged from his children and unemployed, Schlarb had quit playing music. One stormy afternoon, though, he set up mics outside his apartment and recorded the deluge. Liking this field recording, he asked 50 artists to send him brief pieces that he could edit and arrange into a 40-minute composition.

Given its cut-and-paste assembly and diverse cast of contributors (songwriters like Sufjan Stevens and Castanets' Ray Raposa, indie weirdoes like Dave Longstreth, free-jazz players like Tom Abbs and Bhob Rainey), this work unsurprisingly lacks a prevailing tone or compositional theme. At different points, we hear acoustic guitars dishing out tortuous blues, lyrical piano notes tumbling over one another, and some guy muttering an abstract short story - and none lasts more than a couple of minutes. Fortunately, Schlarb’s careful mixing renders these stylistic shifts as tidal ebb and flow, not a John Zorn-like carnival

A loose narrative does, however, run in the background, as recordings of the February storm and Schlarb’s children suggest a series of deeply personal connections and revelations. When we step away from Twilight & Ghost Stories, we can’t be entirely sure what significance the album or the four years spent making it hold for Schlarb. But we do know it has significance for him, which is enough to give the music a weight and density so often lacking in collage-like compositions.

Phillip Buchan

Chris Schlarb is playing at the Next to Last Fest [see feature here] on Saturday, Dec. 8.