Gazing hard at it, there is no depth in which to plunge, which seems to me the essential ingredient for a successfully crafted drone.
[Release page] Andrew Weathers explains that Someone Else’s Summer describes his long, drawn-out move from North Carolina to California, during which time he was dependent on the kindness of friends and acquaintances for shelter, feeling homeless and outside his life. I myself feel confused by Weathers’ further comment that the album is a progress report on his finger-picking studies of the likes of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, when a string is not strummed until a good twenty minutes into the title centrepiece, and then hardly much more.
The motto inscribed on the insert card makes much more sense of Someone Else’s Summer—”The heat doesn’t press on my chest like weight. It closes and opens.” The album begins with ninety-six seconds of pleasant, home-spun guitar picking and then opens wide for three-quarters of an hour of placid, sustained, humming drone. Pleasant enough but shallow. Gazing hard at it, there is no depth in which to plunge, which seems to me the essential ingredient for a successfully crafted drone. The final act is a nine-minute field recording, a washing-machine loop rotating, passing traffic out the window.
It’s an odd narrative. It is certainly “someone else’s,” because after the inviting prelude, it closes up emotionally. I state this with regret, because our last encounter, 2010’s A Great Southern City, was so warm and welcoming.
Someone Else’s Summer is available on Visceralmedia. [Release page]
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