Seeing, says a cliché from another century, is believing. If you saw Derek Monypeny and Kevin Corcoran perform, you’d know that one plays guitar and shahi baaja (an electric zither whose strings are depressed by typewriter keys), while the other plays drums and percussion. If you saw Corcoran’s photographs, which can be found on the sleeve of Abacomancy (named for a practice of divining the future by seeking patterns in the dirt) and the booklet packaged inside of it, you’d gather that these guys vibe on the desert. And it’s true, they recorded the LP during a one-day, improvisational session in Joshua Tree Calif., where Monypeny lives.
But hearing Abacomancy might impel you to doubt the evidence before your eyes. It contains long stretches where you might not believe that two guys in real time could make such a sound. Or that they could do so with the identified instruments. The action on the wildly flailing, electrically charged opening track gets so compacted and choppy that you might suppose you’re hearing music blowing apart under severe internal pressure. The flickering string tones on “Abacomancy 2” (all six tracks are numbered) might trick you into thinking you’re perceiving a sonic realization of a mirage, even though the concurrent drumming is rendered with beautiful clarity. And “Abocomancy 6” sounds like a collage of sputtering engines.
Even when the duo’s playing is rendered without illusion, it takes you someplace that doesn’t exist. With its underlying drone, tension-inducing brushwork and stirring, dramatically spaced flurries of notes, “Abacomancy 3” is an unmistakably real-time rendering of a dreamtime fantasy: What if Egyptian soundtrack ace Omar Khorshid had sat in with Sandy Bull and Billy Higgins? On Abacomancy, sight and sound are just portals into a realm that transcends concrete perception. [2182 Recording Company]
—Bill Meyer
