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Chris Schlarb: Making The Saint
by Ian Patterson
Having spent four years cutting and pasting fifty trusted musicians on his stunning debut solo recording, Twilight & Ghost Stories (Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2007) guitarist/composer Chris Schlarb may understandably have felt like scaling back. Instead, Schlarb invested similar time and resources to sculpt the beautifully meditative folk-jazz ambient suite Psychic Temple (Sounds Are Active/Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2011) and the outsized pool of backing musicians was on hand again for Psychic Temple II (Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2013) with its Frank Zappa ...
read moreChris Schlarb: Psychic Temple II
by Ian Patterson
Multi-instrumentalist/composer Chris Schlarb rarely does things by halves. Psychic Temple (Sounds Are Active/Asthmatic Kitty, 2011) was the exotic fruit of over a 1000 hours of studio time and an opus that involved twenty nine of California's most progressive musicians. Wordless choir, strings, horns, acoustic and electric instruments combined with drone and subtle electronics to create an utterly sublime sonic meditation--the final word in folk-jazz ambient music. However, with Schlarb, music is always in a state of transition. So it is ...
read moreI Heart Lung: Interoceans
by Ian Patterson
In the universe of I Heart Lung, minimalism conveys great power and beauty and dissonance are two sides of the same coin. The heart and lungs of this collective are Chris Schlarb and Tom Steck; the former's guitar and electronic drones and the latter's talking drums combine to create soundscapes as delicate as summer rain or as tempestuous as a raging sea. Following on the heels of the excellent Between Them a Forest Grew Trackless and Quiet (SAA, 2007), Interoceans ...
read moreChris Schlarb: Twilight and Ghost Stories
by Ian Patterson
Inspiration comes in many guises. In the case of guitarist/producer Chris Schlarb, a rainstorm triggered a synapse in his brain, unlocking a creative process leading to Twilight and Ghost Stories. That is the simplified version of events. Schlarb's first solo album is, ironically, the fruit of contributions from fifty artists. Each forwarded segments of music or field recordings of varying lengths, which Schlarb shaped painstakingly over a period of four years. The result is a fascinating collage of sounds.
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