While the title Garden Variety augurs ordinariness, these sounds are anything but. Ryan Packard is a percussionist who resides in Stockholm, Sweden, but has a Chicago past. In both locations, he has worked across genres, playing composed and improvised music with Dave Rempis, Lia Kohl, Finn Loxbo, Marja Ahti and Magnus Granberg, amongst many others. In every setting, Packard brings close attention to the music’s conceptual underpinnings as well as fierce intensity to its performance. Both of these qualities are present on this album-length solo performance.
In popular-music settings, drum solos are often cues to hit the head. Not here; Garden Variety both demands and rewards close attention. It’s a sequence of numbered performances (four on the LP, five for the digital edition) that apply a particular technique to one or more amplified instruments (bass or snare drum, bell plate, speaker cone, bullroarer), sometimes augmented by triangles. The amplification of each instrument’s resonance is an essential part of the process. It causes the sounds that Packard obtains by striking or rubbing to mutate as well as decay, and it’s this phenomenon of emergence that he’s after.
Sounds shimmer, they blur, and interior rhythms crack their way out of his chosen cadences. As they change, he adjusts his attack to let it manifest and develop. Each piece has its own character, ranging from sullen noise to trance induction to walking around inside the ring of a bell. And taken together, they present sound as a spectacle to be experienced, respected and facilitated, not just something you hear. [Dinzu Artefacts]
—Bill Meyer
