Sand City, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo’s debut album, was the culmination of a half-dozen years of occasionally public and frequently private development of a very particular vibe. The LP, recorded live in the studio in June 2010 and released later that year, crystalized the pair’s ideal mode of exchange. Live, loose, open-ended and overtly transcendental, Sand City treated the peaks from Sandy Bull’s albums for Vanguard in the 1960s as a territory to be mapped out in scrupulous detail.
Over the next decade, Steve Gunn and John Truscinski’s music together branched out, cutting diverse potentialities through the rich loam of guitar/drums history like a river fanning out into a delta. Then, in 2023, they included a strong third party: Bill Nace (Body/Head). Glass Band, the album that the threesome made together, disrupted the duo’s essential cohesiveness like a centrifuge, pushing the sound apart and out.
Flam, Gunn and Truscinski’s fifth LP as a duo, redefines their sound. You won’t hear their original instrumentation at all on the first piece, “Broad Street Bells,” just a drizzle of thumb-piano plinks over a layers of church-bell field recordings and amp buzz. The linked sequence of “Camouflage,” “Fin” and “Live Text” continues that practice of layering, with Gunn’s classical guitar and Truscinski’s nearly subliminal drum beats weaving through sheets of billowing electronic sound.
On the album’s second side, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo revives its old sound only to blow it apart with gusts of distortion on “Conviction” or more gently subdue it with the becalmed tempo of “For Ika.” The twosome’s chemistry has been transformed from one of signature instrumental exchanges to one of shared ideas about sound. [Three Lobed]
—Bill Meyer
