Tarotplane / Seawind of Battery / rootless at Rhizome
January 28, 2023
For years I’ve followed
Rhizome, an art/music/poetry/whatever collective, without ever actually stepping foot inside their venue based in the Takoma neighborhood of DC. (I’ve seen some of their outdoor events.)
I liked the idea of a non-profit arts and performance space in a residential neighborhood. But with the pandemic, inside shows took a back seat, and most of the time I was unfamiliar with their performers, so I rarely put their shows in the calendar.
Gentrification is taking hold and the crotchety old Rhizome house is destined to be
torn down and replaced by condos so I wanted to change that, and the opportunity finally arose last weekend with a three-performer set of guitar instrumental music.
Baltimore-based psychedelic instrumental guitarist PJ Dorsey records as
Tarotplane, and his work had been featured in a recent article in the
Washington Post, which intrigued a friend of mine who shared the show with me. It’s music that is clearly psychedelic, but it’s not psychedelic rock. It’s ruminative instrumental string-based music, mostly but not entirely performed on guitar. When I arrived at Rhizome on Saturday night, I didn't realize that the Tarotplane set was already half over by that point. What I heard was an intriguing synthesis of recorded Indian tabla drumming over which Dorsey was playing what I later found was a Thai or Lao stringed instrument called a phin, something like a lute or zither. It was all improvisational but had a clear patient structure and unfolded calmly and thoughtfully. I happened to be there with two acquaintances, both of them Indian, and I was curious about their reaction to this take on South Asian music forms. One I spoke to was unfailingly complimentary, although she said it was much better to listen to while high. I am wiling to concede that point but was not in a position to test her hypothesis. I missed the half of his performance that was guitar-based, but thanks to the magic of digital recording, this entire Saturday show by Tarotplane is available as a
pay-what-you-want download on Bandcamp.
Seawind of Battery defines itself as “east coast cosmic country” which sounds like in Acela corridor version of Gram Parsons. It's not. Mike Horn does however perform with Ryley Walker and others, and has a very interesting
biography. This is actually a new name of his recordings, initially launched in 2022 with the album Clockwatching. It’s lovely stuff; imagine Ry Cooder soundtracks with haunted slide and pedal steel over strummed acoustic. It’s almost entirely wordless — Horn had a throat disorder that took away his ability to sing — but it’s lyrical in its own way, with sampled birdsong and drone gently complementing the stringed instruments.
rootless is described on its materials as “establishing a firm place in American folk, jazz, and new-age music” driven by fingerpicked acoustic guitar and periodic ruminative lyrics.
Oddly, or not — this is DC — rootless’s principal Jeremy Hurewitz is a
foreign policy analyst and think tanker. At Rhizome the rootless performance was the most deliberately rustic in tone. It was also the only one with the tiniest bit of vocals; in fact I almost didn’t realize that they had a vocal mic set up until Hurewitz started a brief murmured lyric or two.
By coincidence this performance occurred on the date of the death of Tom Verlaine of Television. Given his importance in the world of guitar innovation, it’s not a surprise that the three musicians took a moment to reflect on Verlaine’s importance, and the familiar spiky introduction of “Marquee Moon” played over the PA as the show wound down and the crowd dispersed into the Takoma Park neighborhood.
