marcia bassett/margarida garcia/manuel mota: here they rest immobile

Marcia Bassett, Margarida Garcia, and Manuel Mota present Here They Rest Immobile on Yew Records. "It feels cliché to refer to any music as dreamy, but when you encounter music that actually feels and breathes like a dream, it's another matter altogether. Sometimes you open your mouth to speak and hear the voice of a complete stranger. Or you see a flower of a color that doesn't exist. This is that kind of record -- elusive and intoxicating. Two guitars and a bass, barely recognizable as such, coming together to conjure a startling world of shadow and reflection. The music can seem almost disembodied on the one hand, while on the other the careful listening and responsiveness of the musicians behind the sounds is evident at every turn -- human and inhuman at once. The three pieces feel both narrative and wholly abstract, a story somehow unmoored from events. It's an album of transfixing paradoxes. The first side is occupied by 'The Unfortunate Traveler'. Tones moan and echo, resonating against themselves like enormous insects. Sounds emerge and retreat into caves. Ominous howls, eerie rhythmic washes, and deep rumbles all ebb and flow outside any ability to predict what will happen next. Every path seems altered the moment you start down it. An unfortunate traveler indeed. On 'Tympanie Of Tears', the first track on the second side, Garcia's bass pulses with timpani-like resonance, pulsing as Bassett and Mota's guitars swirl like serpents, weaving and winding, forming imaginary pathways. We encounter moments of more recognizable string work, which only expands the sense of disorienting stupor. 'Durational Dust Construction' rounds out the set, with its subterranean glimmers of breath, airs rolling over one another, gliding and scraping down hills of their imaginary landscape, oars rowing slowly out to sea. Across all the terrible conditions, unexpected attempts at life, a magnetic dance around poles that will never touch. It's a record that arouses the senses through obfuscation, a dense riddle constructed from its own speculative geometry. Maybe I thought I'd seen a ghost, and in those days, I found ghosts extremely unpleasant. Not anymore. Now, on the contrary, they brighten up my afternoons." --Matt Krefting, Holyoke, MA 2019