Search - Nels Cline, Devin Sarno :: Edible Flowers

Nels Cline, Los Angeles's premier avant rock and odd-jazz guitarist might be best known for his work with the Geraldine Fibbers and Mike Watt. But his solo and trio works are, creatively at least, huge contrasts to anything resembling rock. This duet CD with solo artist Devin Sarno (a.k.a. Crib) is a seamless, heavily textured display of the sonic depths of electric guitar. You can hear what Cline does here in his rock contexts, but only in the loudest, most disjointed moments. It's not that all these pieces are exceptionally loud, but they are all tangled and mangled, mixing extended lengths of electric distortion and steel-door clangorousness with Iannis Xenakis-like glissandi and thickness. This might be even less for the faint of heart than the Geraldine Fibbers, but it's also completely uncompromising and scary and odd and smart. --Andrew Bartlett