Nimis & Arx

Cello, electronics, guitar, voice and more. Espvall has played with Eugene Chadbourne and Pauline Oliveros, and you can hear both here – very diverse music, haunting. The two long, mostly solo cello tracks (7, 9) rank right up there with Joelle Leandre and Eugene Chadbourne, as far as wild passionate and extremely diverse playing goes. Spooky, dark, dissonant, often psychedelic. FCC clean.

1. Cello and feedback-y guitars, cranky and a little psychedelic.
2. Chill pretty cello, multitracked? with slight screeching.
3. Sounds like a mbira (but isn’t), south american-sounding recorder, electronic percussion noises.
*4. Tense cello and electronics – free jazz + noise = tasty. Then quiet solo cello, then slightly folky melodies multitracked with eerie background cello, then deep scratchy end.
5. Spacey plucked electric guitar, closely dissonant, slow and plodding.
*6. Like 5 but with bowed cello. Lyrical and haunting.
*7. Awesome title. Diverse track lots of changes. Starts screechy cello with *amazing* harmonies – don’t think I’ve heard anything sounding quite like them. Sounds like a squeaky swingset for a while. Starts looping and electronically manipulating some snippets. Gets tense/intense, lower, richer, woosy. Then very still and tense. Then lilting, minor folksy, then sliding all over, then squeaky like Judy Dunaway’s balloon music, last minute is between rock and jazz – fat low chords and arpeggios.
8. Guitar with chanting female vox – weird scale/tuning system.
*9. Solo cello, mixing world, jazz, mod. classical – beautiful ride. I cried.
10. Plodding guitar and manipulated cello. Grating dissonant slow.
11. Psychedelic tango to start?? Twisted, jamming, dark, Halloween-y track. The rhythm/beat stays the same through the whole track.