September 18, 2002

DURING ONE OF those rare balmy nights that we get in Oakland after the kind of day we call a real scorcher, Robin and I slept outdoors and drifted off to the music of our borderland. The frog chorus croaked a two-note pattern, emphasizing and slightly rushing the second beat. The crickets kept their own time, which I initially counted as 6/4, but realized it was frequently skipping into seven, like a heart murmur. The weirdly interlocking amphibian-insect counter-rhythms bleated and chirped against the rising and falling drone of the nearby freeway and the hum of a neighbor's air conditioner. Occasionally the entire suburban symphony would slow down or speed up, as if it had been dubbed onto stretchy audiotape. Once or twice during the night, a freight train added its mournful horn from across town, and an hour or so before dawn an automated sprinkler system took a solo, its steady tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk racing into spurts of double time.

The borderland music that Steve Tibbetts makes on his latest CD, A Man about a Horse, is neither as spontaneous nor as overtly "natural" as our free-form backyard concert, but it packs just as wide a range of environmental and humanmade sounds into its 45 minutes, and its eight pieces inspire just as much wonder. Tibbetts began piecing together his latest masterwork just before going in for surgery to reconstruct a broken wrist. He recorded a series of roaring drum tracks using samples from his 1991 percussion studies in Bali and then played an evening's worth of gonzo electric and acoustic guitar, inspired by the possibility that he might come out from under the knife unable to perform with the same facility that has made him a minor deity in the pantheon of jazz-rock guitar gods.

Later, as he explains in copious notes made available through his record label, ECM, Tibbetts "sliced, diced, turned inside-out and backwards, and often left as-is" his guitar work and recruited Jim Anton to play bass, Marcus Wise to add percussion, and longtime collaborator Marc Anderson to double up some of the drum patterns and put "some air" around the prerecorded beats. In addition to emitting flaming electric rock licks and blistering acoustic riffs, Tibbetts's guitars triggered "diatonic masses" of sampled sounds, including gongs and lots of incidental noises such as Balinese frogs, insects, and chickens. Tibbetts also mixed in voices he recorded reading a tantric text at a retreat center in Vermont, but he folded them into the "swish of the cymbals and the attack of the percussion," making them "hide in the shakers, and whisper along with the gongs ... like something you are trying to remember but can't."

A New Age musician who had made the same pilgrimages as the 48-year-old Tibbetts – to India, Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, Thailand, Java, and Bali – might have blurred such a panoply of audio sources into innocuously soothing atmospherics. A world beat poseur might have concocted a coy mishmash of ethnic electronica. But Tibbetts is a guy who, as a 14-year-old, long before launching his career on vinyl in 1977 with his own Frammis label (www.frammis.com), would recline with his head between the speakers and dream his own dreams while listening to Revolver and After Bathing at Baxter's. And as a grown-up recording artist he has mixed his albums while doing A-B comparisons with Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti and Tool's Lateralus. While A Man about a Horse is hardly short on ethereal and ambient textures, they are layered into a sweeping now-dense, now-diaphanous soundscape of often jolting dynamic changes. The album percolates and drifts, but it also rocks and grinds. It opts for intense rapture rather than low-key bliss.