New moons don’t cast much light, and this recording begins in near nothingness. Spare, reverberant guitar notes gradually materialize, slowly resolving into two shadowy outlines. One dimly shimmers, the other shudders, and together they trace a path into a foreground surrounded by darkness. That is, one supposes, how this concert began, but you can never be quite sure with a Loren Connors album. In his determination to get at the essentials, he’s quite willing to cut back material that’s already quite spare.
Connors is now in his mid 70s and living with Parkinson’s disease, and it’s a feat every time his hand touches the guitar’s body or strings; it shows in the unvarnished, looming presence of each sound he makes. The vivid aura he manifests sets a high bar for his partners, but Elliott Sharp and Michael Vallera have the necessary reach. Each picks carefully from his personal bag of distinct techniques just the right action to intensify the music without adding to its density. Vallera provides subtle luminescence and stormy turbulence, while Sharp adds skipping propulsion and gusts of prickly, precisely placed notes that pull the sound field into focus.
Players move in and out of the action over the course of When The Moon Is New’s four tracks before drawing to a close with a brief, alien blues that snuffs out the last of the moon’s brief light. [Feeding Tube]
—Bill Meyer
