Press
The Wire
Uncut
"Fire Lapping at the Creek may look like a straight-up Appalachian blues album, but the music is rife with improvisation and experimentation. Alec Goldfarb‘s ensemble brings a touch of New Orleans to the deep woods..."
"One distinguishing aspect of Mr. Golub's structurally ingenious music... is its potent sense of drama... reflective asides and thundered remarks, framed by something like soliloquys from Mr. Goldfarb's guitar." - Larry Blumenfeld
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Fire Lapping at the Creek interprets the blues through a singular lens. Sure, the vibe is of the bluesy variety as the bandleader Goldfarb shows off his knack for shredding, rattling off salvo after salvo of trudging, silky and sweltering licks. but as is written in the album’s liner notes, “There are echoes from places one would not often associate with the blues: the Shire Highlands of malawi, Lutheran Convents in Saxony, and the coasts of the Arabian Sea.” In other words, the ten dazzling Goldfarb-penned compositions that make up the album deconstruct the blues by spinning it in a way that is inspired by all corners of the earth along with Delta blues and jazz. Some tunes suggest robert Johnson spraying his twangy blues riffs alongside mingus’ big band. Thrilling tunes such as the title track, “And the red Light as my mind” and “You gotta take Sick and Die some of these Days”, attain such ecstatic heights. Goldfarb, in leading an outstanding group comprised of David Leon (alto), Xavier Del Castillo (tenor), Zekkereya el-magharbel (trombone), Chris Tordini (bass) and Steven Crammer (drums) has produced a modern-day blues-centric masterpiece.
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On the other end of the spectrum lies Earth’s Precisions, a mind-expanding, minimalist collaboration that finds Goldfarb in duo mode with the intrepid composer and improviser rogers, a cornerstone of the New York City avant garde scene. As each of the five shape-shifting meditations form and mutate, its apparent rogers and Goldfarb are kindred souls. It’s as if every shriek, tone, spike and pattern is akin to a telepathic transmission between the pair—an unspoken vocabulary that comes into focus when the listener is immersed in its sonic vistas. At times, Rogers’ soprano, alto and tenor saxophones and Goldfarb’s guitar resemble a single instrument, reaching an apex where exquisite beauty and stark terror meet. While the two instrumentalists nod to saxophone and guitar duos like Anthony braxton/Fred Frith and Tim berne/bill Frisell, Earth’s Precisions is their very own voice, linked as a united entity in sound.
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These two recordings are testament to Goldfarb’s dauntless investigations into a remarkably broad stylistic spectrum in which his adventurous compositional virtuosity is laid bare." - Brad Cohan
"Alec Goldfarb belongs to a generation of adventurous authors and performers who do not rely on the achievements of their predecessors: for the aforementioned, every creative act must somehow exist on its own, as the troubled incarnation of a natura sonorum intrinsically plural and impossible to tipify, truly alive only in the transience of the present moment in which it manifests itself with furious urgency.
Here, together with three equally valiant soloists, the young, Brooklyn-based rampant compiles a first portrait album that reflects his metamorphic, “disheveled” soul – although by choice limited to the field of string instruments –, the oblique and untiring formal research that only in the tangibility of the sonic gesture, hence in the touch, may become pregnant expression.
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Yet this temperament could not translate into pieces more different from one another: nor are they pure exercises in style, but rather the result of a profound connection with the voice proper to each timbral and performative singularity, object and subject as the equal elements of a blend in no way replicable. Sufficient proof of this would be “Glos(s)a”, the telluric reimagination of a double bass (Mat Muntz) whose potential deflagrates in a polyphony of a rough coexistence of hallucinated overtones and glissandi, extreme register contrasts and violent percussive thrusts; sixteen minutes whose uncompromising alterity doesn’t fade even in the second half played in pizzicato, the triumph of the sensual and very human contact that the hand trajectories establish between the strings and the wood.
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No true spiritual father, we said: but, if anything, what’s made evident by the oblique and unresolved harmonies of the titular piece, interpreted by Goldfarb himself, is his turning to musical traditions not entirely codified, to the East which contemplates every possible gradient between tones. From the amplified and reverberated guitar unravels a song apparently devoid of stable nuclei, resting solely on the fragile motifs which, as if through mitosis, go on to expand and double in vibrant variations with nervous arpeggios and trills, irregular chords and random punctuation.
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This does not prevent Goldfarb from arriving by cross roads, especially in the last two passages, at certain formal solutions that starkly distinguish themselves in the panorama of the second half of the 20th century in Europe. Thus in the moans and screeches of Marina Kifferstein’s violin – a core member of the TAK Ensemble – Sciarrino’s ‘capricci’ seem to echo as much as the deep scanning of the most unquiet spectralism; but the crude poetics of “movements of words and letters, errors of everyday life” also find some tangencies with those overseas figures who have managed to deny authorship in favor of a pure acoustic phenomenology, from pioneer James Tenney to mature Jim O’Rourke, of whom return here the vocalizations consonant to the soft tonal lines of the instrument.
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But the most dissimilar and enigmatic episode of the lot is reserved for the finale: already from its peremptory title, “No reading if this were ever sounded” announces itself as a meta-score in which action and conceptual thought intersect, the live playing blurs with extraneous recordings that laconically underline the intentions that emerged during Goldfarb’s creative process. With an erratic gait the viola (Carrie Frey) advances towards a ‘presto delirando’ at the top of which circular motifs of absurd sharpness alternate, piercing ostinatos which, like the human voice and its incorporeal simulacrum, are confined in a conscious incommunicability but to which, however, remains the right to impetuously affirm their dignity to exist and to permeate the acoustic space.
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Driven by the insatiable desire to continually become something else, Alec Goldfarb opens the doors of his sonic universe with an album that is nothing less than dazzling, an act of force that challenges perception denying any descriptive pretensions, entrusted as it is to the cathartic and incorruptible aura of a performative moment lived to the fullest. It is the best possible example of what valuable contribution the new generation can make in an evolutionary perspective for the 21st century."