After formative years of music-making in various cities, Danny Fisher-Lochhead and Ryan Blotnick independently found their way to an island in Maine, where they have lived and collaborated since 2015. As with any profoundly seasonal place, their public musical activities tend to proliferate in the warmer months, and then contract again in the colder months, leaving time for imagining, writing, cultivating, and working on the more personal, internal aspects of music.
When the winter of 2020/2021 arrived after almost a year of pandemic lockdown of varying degrees, the level of isolation that lay ahead was even more daunting than in other years. Now the small amount of socializing that would normally get a person through the winter in Maine was reduced to even fewer connections. Danny and Ryan, along with their partners and a few friends, decided to pod up for much of the pandemic, and hunker down for what felt like the longest winter in history.
In years past, they would normally get together every week or so for art parties, to make music, art, cook, drink wine, and carve out some warmth in the enveloping darkness. During the pandemic, these musical sessions became even more of a lifeline to the world that we all had been so abruptly ejected from, and to the life-giving aspects of music that had become painfully evident in their sudden scarcity. Instead of writing music to play together, Danny and Ryan turned to improvisation, the only method of collaboration that felt relevant to that moment, telling their story directly to the microphone.
So the music on small talk was taken from four different hour-long recording sessions from December 2020 to February 2021 that took place in Ryan's home studio. They decided to set a timer for each session and play for an hour at a time, whether they felt like they had anything to play or not. Often this constraint pushed them past their normal tendencies and inclinations as to when to keep going / when to stop, and fueled the exploration process of unexpected and serendipitous musical textures. What they discovered through these sessions was, among other things, that they could tap into a kind of mind meld where they each had the feeling that they knew exactly what the other would play next.
The degree of isolation which surrounded and influenced this project created a singular kind of personal language for the two of them, which felt separate from any particular scene or standards of practice, and aligned more with their sincere desires of what they needed to hear and feel at that moment. Because of this, many of the tracks of small talk bear an uncharacteristically melodic feeling for improvised music, and place it in a stylistically ambiguous zone that feels both straightforward and ecstatic, experimental and grounded, and very personal.
After these recording sessions, they took a few months to pore over the material (about four hours worth) and decide how to treat it. The first approach was to cut it into exceedingly small sections that felt alive, then exceedingly long ones to give the sense of flow from one idea to the next, and eventually arrived at some balance between the two approaches. The first two tracks ("Can I Tell You" and "At Sea / Haircuts") present an un-edited twelve minute excerpt taken from the very beginning of one of the hour-long sessions. The rest of the tracks, then, are more like highlights from the different sessions.
During the editing process Ryan described the record a little like a good friend -- one who tends to get better the more you get to know them, rather than the other way around. In small talk you will hear a simple and real story of two people's experience of a singular moment in the world.
credits
released February 25, 2022
Danny Fisher-Lochhead, alto saxophone
Ryan Blotnick, guitar
Recorded and mixed by Ryan Blotnick at Somes Studio in Southwest Harbor ME USA
Mastered by Jacob Blumberg in San Francisco CA USA
Collage art by Danny Fisher-Lochhead
Layout design by Matthew Golombisky
Produced by the band
thanks to Dan Knobler for generous use of his tape machine
thanks to Katherine, Keri, Anna, and David for all their emotional support through the process
This album captivated me quickly. The listener can hear the high energy of New York through their instrumentation and I love It! One example of this I throughly enjoy is their implementation of accelerando (speeding up the tempo) throughout songs. If you enjoy contemporary jazz this album is worth your attention. Wes Wood