SeFa LoCo: Creosote

A distant train whistle blows through a broad and ominous unknown. Something scratches the walls, scraping the ramshackle boundaries around hearing. Over the loose floorboards, a plucked bass sings, while something thuds down below the floor. Noise sets in gradually on the opening track of SeFa LoCo's release Creosote—and from here, there is no escape. An environment that steadily becomes more uncertain, "All Nervous" is just as the title diagnoses: both a mind mid-immolation, and a summing totality of dislocated senses that will rail piecemeal over the next twelve minutes.

Consisting of percussionist Ron Coulter, saxophonist Bret Sexton, guitarist Farrell Lowe and bassist Mike Facey, SeFa LoCo have released as their debut album a document of their initial meeting onstage in 2021. The resultant effort works in the best mode of live improvisation: as unpremeditated meditation, a collective experiment working itself out in real time. They've met as strangers do—but under the train. The product, Creosote, like the dark, slimy preservative of its name, stirs up all the gross formulations of modern life: the toxic imbalance of impulse and industry, the havoc of bitter preservatives; soot, sod, and smoke.

On "Preshure," Sexton yawps singingly, setting a frantic measure of time that Coulter matches with sharp slashes on the cymbals. This spray of metallic harmonics weirdly harmonizes, over the track's panicked duration, with Sexton's soft wailing and Facey's yawning glissandos happening on a terrible beauty. On polished moments like these, the quartet lets sound flow and intermingle, however abruptly, with music, less harsh than hazardous. By pairing a lyrical use of extended techniques with immodest melodies and cloudy chords, the group fashions intermedial zones that shift between ruin and rumination.

Lowe's tasteful use of reverb, tremolo, and delay offset Coulter's percussive tinkling on "Spinning Room," a noir set piece revolving around crackling radio signals, distant signs of something human. As the track's long take slowly pans, Facey's upper-register strumming nearly uncovers the alignment of Sexton's tone with the radio's stammer, and the movement eventually resigns to an elegiac pedal-point: a form barely born before it ekes into silence. The quartet's willing ears and mutual curiosity can play its own tricks.

The acoustic conjuring shreds presences on the oddly titled "3 Part 4," which transitions from ghoulish quietude to polyphonic swarm over the course of nearly fifteen minutes. Like elsewhere on the album, the mood ranges between anxious amusement and avid anguish. Midway through, Facey's virtuosic grating leads on Lowe's spare tones, before Sexton volleys with clucks and clicks like the animal impressions which the earliest saxophonists cut their teeth on. These clashes are an intricate interplay, undercut with Coulter's popping percussion, a symphony of air ducts.

Linked through blues telepathy, SeFa LoCo's members have summoned the damp interiors of half-finished infrastructures, creaking doors left ajar, entries forgotten on sites of mutilated demolition. The snuffling, sniveling finale "PplpP" rages like a muzzled dog in a locked minivan. Here, closer to the arbitrariness of extraction than most industrial acts, the quartet drives on an anthem of ire, studded with hissing contraptions, drills, and heavy lifters. The remnants of a human voice, smothered in Sexton's manipulated saxophone, cry relentlessly through a commotion of convulsing machinery. Contrasts like these make the group's ravaging clamor all the sharper, their early-morning quiet all the dimmer. And raising its carbonaceous head from this construction's incessant teardown, the air is suffused with the aroma of Creosote.

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