Though they have long been a couple in the romantic sense, I Wish I Didn’t Dream is the first time that legendary avant guitarist Loren Connors and vocalist Suzanne Kangille have made a duo album. It is a stark and uncompromising affair which provides some thrilling moments on careful listening.
The most distinct aspect of Connor’s lone guitar is the constantly phased sound and how its various ebbs, delicate filigrees and vicious howls sound like they are trying to escape from the distance in the back of the room while Langille’s voice is, by contrast, close-mic-ed and intimate in every sense. She improvises slowly meandering, folksy melodies, or beat-like spoken verse for words appropriated from John Keats, Robert Hornton, Denis McCarthy or the 1980s peace movement, or her own poetry which borrows equally from banal conversation and catch slogans as it does from metaphysical poetry. These melodies don’t relate harmonically with Connor’s guitar explorations but clearly the two are feeding off each other live in their improvisations, as illustrated in places like ‘La Belle Sans Merci’ where the two climb to a simultaneous sonic climax after 9 minutes of gradual incline, or ‘Just Find Your Shoes’, the lyrics of which sound like a mother’s everyday advice to a small child while the sonic rise and falls are more in sync with existential angst. The sound of Connors pick hitting his guitar strings in these rush moments, or the squeaking of feet on floor, keep the immediacy of the improvisation ever present.
The album is more than just these interactions, however. A series of paintings by M P Landis accompany each track, the images reproduced in the booklet enclosed. A short story by producer Kurt Gottschalk about visiting Syracuse merely because it was close yet a place he could be anonymous and alien is also included and all four artists are listed as if they were ‘the band’. These visual and literary extras give much to the abstract sound which, along with obtuse lyrics, have you making small connections between all the different elements. The work’s meaning develops as much, if not more, through the death-of-the-author post-modernism of consuming the work as in its actual creation.
Ultimately, the monochrome nature of the production makes Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille – I Wish I Didn’t Dream a difficult proposition, but perseverance is rewarded, particularly if you allow all four elements (sound, lyrics, paintings, literature) an equal balance rather than the traditional hierarchy of voice over accompaniment over packaging. And, while many of the real visceral rushes come via Connor’s amp (just check out the opening of ‘It Will Only Continue’), sense and accessibility come via a more intellect based approach to what is, ultimately, a work of great depth and power.
Adrian Elmer
