"Decimus' Evening Ragas Vol. 4 is Pat Muranos first solo guitar LP. Pat uses setting here both as accompaniment and foil. Side A opens with the outdoors and its accompanying sound and slowly over the course of the side, mirrors them back at us in a mutated form -- a photograph melting on the dashboard of a long-inert car. Strings mingle with crickets and become a pair of twins vocalizing, reminiscent, in a way, of a children's lullaby from Night of the Hunter. A plucked string becomes a glistening soap bubble that pops on the end of a branch. A palm muting strings becomes a storm front rolling in and dissipating just as it's noticed. The guitar obscures itself as it becomes cats and foxes communicating across empty fields. The natural world and the sound world meld into some winged thing -- cicadas giving way to delay, giving way to unknown things landing in fields while most of us sleep. I'm reminded more of 'recordists' like Anne McMillan and Knud Viktor than of other guitarists. I sense that Pat is steering and being steered throughout this record. A really true improvisation where any need for authorship kind of falls away and allows for a true sense of discovery and joy in the sounds being made. The B side also twists the familiar but in a different way. Instead of something being reflected back at us, sustained notes rise up, meet and coil around the sound of crickets. A new totality that tonally feels like a microscope placed on the artificial. Melodrama smooths out into morse code. Again music becomes nature, nature becomes music and they are both held there until something real and new emerges. Some kind of Steve Ditko cosmos unfolds into something that feels very modern and very old -- like a skipping media that creates a new world completely unintended or contained in the original piece. I find Pat's approach to be very inspiring and loose, true and unconcerned with anything but what the sounds themselves want." --Bill Nace Philadelphia 2024
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