Wow. Every year I run into a musician who, at least from me, comes out of nowhere and makes a statement that makes me think of the incredible virtuosity that exists in the realm of jazz but as far as I can tell "Edsel Axle" or better yet Rosali Middleman play more rock-styled guitar. Here it has an improvised flavor and really hits the spot. Keep going.
From Aquarium Drunkard Interview:
AD: Do you plan on performing these pieces live or is it strictly a recording project? If you do end up playing live, will you bring on other guitar players to help achieve the full sound of the album?
Edsel Axle: Right now, it’s a recording project, but I’m trying to work up the confidence to play solo like this in front of an audience. Because it’s improvisational and I enter into a trance-like state, it’s hard to achieve that when nervous. I feel like it’s the next phase for me though, so someday. But it would be different from the record. I wouldn’t attempt to play these songs as they are recorded anyhow. It’s about their singularity, a cloud floating by.
Since the compositions are centered around base layers and building from there with what is in my head — first thought / best thought — I hadn’t really considered bringing in other players. I feel like that would be fun, but, by nature, a completely different project as it would involve the thought process and style of another player bringing all of their ideas and energy to the table. I love to collaborate and I have projects in the same vein like Monocot (with drummer / percussionist Jayson Gerycz), but it’s not Edsel Axle.
AD: Does the name “Edsel Axel” have a history or significance for you, or is it a distinct creation? Was creating Edesl a way of separating your instrumental mode from your other work as Rosali?
Edsel Axle: It’s a long running joke in my family that my Dad was going to name my brother “Edsel Axle.” I’m one of seven kids, six girls and my brother is the youngest. All the girls have somewhat unique and unusual names and my Dad always said he wanted to give my brother that name, before settling on Michael. My Dad is into cars and we’re from Michigan (where the Edsel was made), and he’s a real punster so that’s where it came from. He’s also a killer guitarist and musician so, in that respect, the name is a little tribute to him.
And yes, I wanted an alter ego for my experimental work. It allows me to shape-shift a little. I have a good friend who told me she heard the album and didn’t know it was me. She wanted to know more about who “this Edsel Axle person is,” and discovering it was me blew her mind. That really made my day.
You’re probably familiar with the work of North Carolina singer-songwriter Rosali Middleman for her work under her first name. Most recent album, the excellent No Medium released via SPINSTER in 2021, was a deeply personal collection of what we called “raw folk rock ballads that display a triumphant vulnerability.”
Later this summer Middleman returns with a new record, this time under the moniker Edsel Axle. Titled Variable Happiness, the album will be released by Worried Songs and proves something of a change of pace. Forgoing vocals in favour of wandering, cosmic-minded instrumental compositions, Edsel Axle is an outlet for solo guitar work, recorded at home straight to a four-track cassette rig. “[Middleman’s] voice takes a winter hibernation,” as the label put it, “to showcase the prodigious slow burn thump of her solo electric guitar playing.”
You can now listen to the title track and lead single to hear this in action, a warm and patient slice of meditative Americana which bubbles forth from a deceptively simple cyclical guitar line, trembling with psychedelic energy as it unfurls like the scented smoke from an incense stick. It’s proof that lyrics are not required to conjure tangible, lingering feelings, that sometimes music can strike right at the heart of things we otherwise find difficult to describe.
Middleman’s gently tenacious riffs, made bristly with distortion and cushioned by generous layers of reverb, wander and wonder with a drifting ease. But despite the loose nature of the setup and the focus on immediacy, there is a sort of pattern to these trips. Middleman feeds a background riff, usually elongated and slightly bent, almost always full of sustain and whorls of feedback, through a looper pedal, and then plays shorter, more inquisitive, often knotty phrases over it. The pace is unhurried – the average track clocks in at around eight minutes, and the tempo and texture are slow, dreamy, with plenty of time for dwelling on ideas and plotting next moves. The result is vaguely cyclical without being rigid or confining, and free without being untethered or chaotic.
From this simple template comes a surprising variety of moods and expressions. Opener “Some Answer” is a bleary mélange of hazy, ringing distress calls and woozy warning signals, sweetly acrid, pulverized melodies mixing like sheets of humid air in front of an approaching whirlwind. The name, like the music on this album, is mysterious and ambivalent. Is it providing a partial explanation of something, or is the tone sarcastic – some answer meaning no answer at all? And what was the question, anyway? “Her Wind Horse” is an even darker, though perhaps less cryptic meditation on mental and physical weather, with whistling dissonance and Ditch-era Neil Young noodling, full of keening, bummer notes that sound like uncoiled springs. But there are also more pointillist, concrete numbers, such as “Present Moment,” which has a swaying momentum driven by firmly strummed chords, twinkling, chiming notes and even, for a minute or so, something resembling a conventional lead guitar line, mussed up and deconstructed though it may be. The title track is the centerpiece of the album, and though it drifts and winds with shrewd abandon, it also has a central consonance that makes it feel less elusive and flickering – more forthrightly present than many of the other songs, in spite of the wavering tremolo of these brambly meditations.
But through the noise-strewn forest of passing thoughts, complex reveries and expectant forebodings, there’s a distinct through line. Even at her most densely overdriven (check the massed storm of “Come Down from the Tree Now” that segues directly into the arid plain of “Her Wind Horse”), Middleman’s playing has a fierce serenity, a “Singular Grace,” to borrow the name of the shimmering transcendental fugue that ends the album. Variable Happiness, in all its mercurial variations, assuredly captures another side of an emerging artist hitting her stride, shedding (and shredding) new light on her past albums and suggesting a wealth of possibilities and surprises to come.
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