While the name of this album implies immobility, the record itself will not be confined. It first appeared in 2022 as a download, dispatched straight from the performer’s computer to yours. But now it’s back, newly solid and rotatable, in LP form. Put it on, and it’ll take you on a trip that you might not understand, but you won’t forget.
Theoxenia is but one guise of multi-instrumentalist and occasional singer Dave Shuford, who has also recorded with Rhyton, No Neck Blues Band and D. Charles Speer & The Helix. Clearly, Shuford plays well with others, but as Theoxenia, he goes it alone, combining uncompromising strangeness with strategic discipline. With no one else to placate or employ, Shuford is free to skip between universes. His leisurely fingerpicking on “Continental Breezes” draws inspiration from Moroccan and Nigerien modes; “Opacity Of The Apparatus,” on the other hand, dives deep into murky synthesis without any regard for the need to return. “The Camel Driver” returns to the inexhaustible ancestral well of Greek folk music. And the beyond-woozy “A Resurrection Kink” sounds like an artifact of Merle Haggard and Duane Eddy’s never-publicized lost weekend at Lee Perry’s Black Ark.
But if the tunes are all over the map, or maybe situated somewhere maps will never reveal, each one is realized with determined clarity of intent. If Shuford has half-baked ideas, he did not put any of them on this record, which ensures that no matter where it takes you, it never feels lost. [Soft Abuse]
—Bill Meyer
