Today at the BCA

Boston Center for the Arts and workandworry.com present Overheard/Underground

March 13th | 7-10pm | $10

Pairdown
David Daniell and Doug McCombs &
Glenn Jones

Pairdown is the collaboration of Pittsburgh-based singer-guitarists David Leicht and Raymond Morin. The two met and began performing together in 2005. Their eponymous EP, released on Sort Of Records in 2006, is a collection of six songs blending the duo’s inter-dependent acoustic guitar work with Leicht’s inventive writing. The opening title, “Nonlinear Lions” was coined in a passage of Mike Davis’ book, Ecology Of Fear, concerning the link between environmental fluctuations and outbreaks of “deviant” animal behavior. The song portrays exurban domestic bliss interrupted by emergent, predatory wilderness. A series of uneasy images are feathered with bits of satire, from the intro: “they love the taste of your lotion / ending your motion…” to dada-esque refrain, chanted in a bluesy, two-part harmony: “in this future, you’re furniture!” It becomes evident after experiencing one live show that their emphasis of building upon tradition with contemporary influence would fall short in anyone else’s hands, luckily it is in theirs.

David Daniell and Douglas McCombs are both highly respected musicians within their circles and as a founding member of the experimental jazz band Tortoise, Daniell has collaborated with many notable musicians, including Loren Connors, Rhys Chatham, Tim Barnes, Jeph Jerman, Thurston Moore, Greg Davis, and Jonathan Kane, Tom Ze, Azita Youseffi, Will Oldham, Yo La Tengo, and Calexico.

David and Douglas’ collaboration is a delicate tapestry of spacious and ethereal guitar lines woven into abstract, slow-burning and multi-layered textural improvisations. The sounds blend and overlap to create richly faceted and thickly psychedelic passages, unveiling new layers of detail with each and every listen.

Glenn Jones is a 30-plus-year devotee of the so-called “Takoma school,” Jones has written extensively on the steel-string guitar’s leading lights: John Fahey, with whom he was friends for nearly 25 years, and Robbie Basho, who befriended Jones during the five years before his untimely death in 1986. His music is described by the paramount experimental magazine The Wire as creating “gorgeous luminous settings . . . scored across a series of open tunings, which he threads with beautiful rolling melodies, his slide work soundings like the flutter of tiny metal butterflies . . . one of the best of the recent deluge.”