Warm Weather With Ryan Driver

Eric Chenaux is one of Toronto's most prolific and respected musical iconoclasts, an experimental guitar virtuoso with over two decades of dedicated and diverse service to an artistic community that encompasses postpunk, lo-fi, folk, multi-media composition and performance (chiefly in collaboration with modern dance), and free and improvised music. Warm Weather With Ryan Driver is Eric's third album for Constellation, which has been the conduit for his primary song-oriented solo work since 2006. Building on his fruitful collaboration with piano/synth/melodica player Ryan Driver - whose key role on the new album is signaled by his inclusion in its very title - the new record is without doubt Chenaux's most accomplished and focused work of forward-looking, contemporary balladry. Chenaux's previous album Sloppy Ground was a masterful exploration of fried folkways wedded to improvisational/avant strategies. Buzzing, winding melodic lines derived from Scottish folk tropes paced many of the songs, interspersed with expansive, atmospheric lullabyes. Warm Weather With Ryan Driver envelops the twin tendencies of Sloppy Ground - ornate experimentation with extended melodic structures and cradling lullabye/love song ambience - in a newfound coherence and temperance. Chenaux's use of nylon string guitar as the spine for almost every track (and expertly captured by sound engineer Radwan Moumneh) is the most notable shift in instrumentation from its predecessor, establishing a subtly different but timbrally profound anchor for the new tunes. As the album title suggests, the record is unified by a kind of humid, languorous glue, the sort of atmosphere that Chenaux describes as "that weather where the skin and air see no difference in each other." This sort of climatic metaphor was a touchstone for Chenaux's approach to the arranging and recording, ably supported by Driver's use of droning organs and synths, as well as his delicately paced, subtly jazz-inflected piano. The overall effect is often akin to an interstice of Talk Talk, Palace-era Will Oldham and Richard Youngs. This is some of most subtly sophisticated and satisfying avant-folk music we know.