Bexar Bexar is a mysterious musician from Austin, Texas, and Tropism is his second full-length CD. It’s a quite lovely record – very understated, very minimal – and utterly irresistible. I transferred this to my MP3 player soon after receiving it and have listened to it dozens of times since. It’s hard to explain the quiet charm of this album – on paper, it doesn’t seem like anything special – bloke plays acoustic guitar with subtle synth embellishments and laptop manipulations – but the end result is really unique and special.
A tropism is a response that a plant or animal shows to an external stimulus, such as light or heat, and Tropisms was the title of a collection of short prose pieces by Nathalie Sarraute, and it seems that what Sarraute achieved in fiction, Bexar Bexar does in music. “In the same way, Sarraute argues, people respond to each other, often unconsciously recognising a tic or mannerism or false inflection in the voice… the human ‘tropisms’ of the outer mask often reveal what people are really thinking and where their intentions belie their words.” (from The Nouveau Roman Reader edited by J. Fletcher & J. Calder)
There are ten instrumental, beatless tracks, all of which blur into one another, so that the record is like an extended suite of drifting, pensive mood pieces – fragments of deeply personal reveries.
Bexar Bexar – Window Piece (MP3)
Ewan Burke
