Walker’s new album, Primrose Green, comes out next week. His spring and summer will be filled with further appearances at prestigious stateside music festivals, among them Austin Psych Fest, Pitchfork, and Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival. This weekend Walker performs at the genre-busting Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, and on Monday he plays a local release party at the Chopin Theatre. Its breezy, psychedelic folk-rock glides with the buoyancy of jazz, while extended front-line improvisation embroiders Walker’s soulful guitar excursions the music’s spirit recalls the likes of Tim Buckley, John Martyn, and Tim Hardin. Now this onetime stylistic drifter, who’s never stuck for long to any clique or scene, is about to reach what could be his biggest audience yet: on Tuesday, March 31, high-profile indie label Dead Oceans releases his new album, Primrose Green. But not till the past couple of years has Walker assimilated his own array of musical interests into a sound as unified as O’Rourke’s. To this day he calls O’Rourke’s 1997 instrumental album, Bad Timing, an all-time favorite-its constantly transforming four-part suite, though rooted in a Fahey-esque fingerstyle approach, adds brass fantasias, drones, tape-music disruptions, and marches, among other things. While in high school in his native Rockford, Walker discovered the polyglot music of former Chicagoan Jim O’Rourke. On Evidence he plays impressive albeit slightly derivative John Fahey-esque fingerstyle guitar, but if you went to one of his gigs at the time, you’d be more likely to find him strangling the strings of an electric at one of Myopic Books‘ improv sessions or using it to whip up an unholy din at underground space Mortville-he did most of his acoustic playing in private. When I first wrote about Walker for the Reader in May 2011, he’d just released The Evidence of Things Unseen via local cassette label Plustapes, which had earlier put out a tape of blown-out noise called Tiny Cancer that Walker made with Tiger Hatchery bassist Andrew Scott Young (under the name Wyoming). Now, he resolved, it was time to start focusing. “Luckily, I was still on my parents’ health insurance.” As he recuperated at home after a couple days in Illinois Masonic, he made a decision: Though he’d been throwing himself into music since he was a teenager, his ravenous, equal-opportunity ears had made it tough for him to stick to any one sound, instead leading him by turns into punk rock, noise, folk, free jazz, and anything else that caught his interest. “I cracked my skull, and I’m pretty much deaf in my left ear,” Walker, 25, says with equanimity. In July 2012, as Wicker Park Fest wound down, Chicago guitarist Ryley Walker was riding his bike south on Damen below Division when a hit-and-run driver clipped him from behind. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.Get your Best of Chicago tickets! Line-Up Announced > Close
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |