Gregory Uhlmann, Brokeback, V.V. Lightbody

Gregory Uhlmann

A guitarist and composer with a marked propensity towards mixing the prickly and the beautiful, Uhlmann aims to seamlessly incorporate influences from the rich history of American improvisers, West African music, minimalism, noise, and anything else he finds on the internet (especially cat videos). His output as a leader/co-leader includes the projects and bands, Fell Runner, River Song Quintet, Pocket People, Typical Sisters, ISTANBUL, Walsh/Uhlmann, Tom Foolery, Aquadeer, and different iterations of his name followed by trio, quartet, septet, etc.. As a sideman he is a member of Joe La Barbera’s Global Community Quartet, Andy Clausen’s SHUTTER, Andrew Lessman Trio, Logan Hone’s Similar Fashion, Michael Mull Octet, and Trevor Anderies’s Quintet.

Brokeback

A sense of place has been essential to the music of Brokeback since guitarist/bassist Douglas McCombs first launched the project in 1995. Initially conceived as a solo outlet, the Chicago group has taken on new dimensions over the past two decades, morphing from the lean, pastoral ambience of the first album, Field Recordings from the Cook County Water Table, to the more muscular, taut arrangements and dynamic swells of the last release, Brokeback and the Black Rock, for which McCombs assembled a new quartet lineup. Each album develops with exacting detail, revealing McCombs’s gift for dialing in the essence of a mood, feeling, or distant locale with a handful of reverb-laden guitar tones, elegant and sustained, strategically placed and sparingly deployed. The instrumental landscapes he creates on Illinois River Valley Blues are utterly transportive, evoking familiar open-frontier soundtracks and charting out new sonic territory.

V.V. Lightbody

Nap-rock, on a bus, butterscotchy, no bellybutton, unfashionably late

from the Hideout website