text by Takeshi Goda for JazzTokyo
Chris Pitsiokos / Carny Cant
DL/LP : Eleatic Records ELEA005
Chris Pitsiokos: alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, harmonica, electric bass, electronic drums, voice, all electronic/midi instruments, and electric guitar on track 6.
Rick Eye: electric guitar on tracks 2-5
Jason Nazary: drums on tracks 2, 3, 5
1. Invocation
2. Journal: The Burden of Solidity
3. Go Ahead Rick
4. Lapsarian
5. Journal: The Burden of Memory
6. Question Mark
All music composed, produced and mixed by Chris Pitsiokos.
All words by Chris Pitsiokos
Album Art by Katharina Huber
Bandcamp
Embodying true self revealed in pandemic.
Since the pandemic last Spring, Chris Pitsiokos and I have been in touch via email several times. In March 2020, when the state of emergency was declared in New York, he evacuated to Virginia where his mother lives and stayed in the countryside for a month. In April, he returned to Brooklyn and was forced to refrain from performing. The time he had to endure, not being able to perform or even meet with friends and other musicians, turned out to be a meaningful time for him.
"I have decided to go the other way and take this time to re-evaluate my life, values, and the reasons why I started making music in the first place. I have been practicing more than I have in a long time, my focus has increased and I have also been teaching myself how to repair saxophones, which is an immense rabbit hole to go down. I have decided to shift my focus to being more self-sufficient--economically, emotionally, and creatively, by focusing on myself, my own label, and the series I co-produce... " (newsletter, May 22, 2020).
The material he recorded during the self-restraint period was released digitally on Bandcamp as two mini-albums, "Aswoon" (November 2020) and "Milquetoast" (January 2021). Both were basically improvisational pieces by alto sax with some overdubs. On the other hand, he was also working on more produced project.
"I have been spending a lot of time with books and with visual art during the pandemic, and the creative processes of those kinds of artists has been influencing me more than music lately. In particular, I have been thinking about sitting with a work for longer, and slowly crafting it through recording, reshaping, mixing, producing, mastering. Really creating a world and slowly getting inside of it. Something deeply personal, and unique to me. " (personal mail, September 5, 2020).
Written, recorded, and produced between January and October 2020, Carny Cant features Jason Nagy (member of CP-Unit) on drums and a multi-instrumentalist Rick Eye from Denton, Texas (Gay Cum Daddies, Flesh Narc, Bukkake Moms, etc.) on guitar and all other instruments, harmonica, electric bass, alto sax, baritone sax, and many electronic instruments were played by Pitsiokos himself. The title of the album means "Carnival specific language = secret language among friends that outsiders don't understand". I guess it means that if you listen to it normally, you don't know what it means, but if you are one of us, you can understand the meaning of the secret music. You may be surprised with the different feel of this album from his previous music. Furthermore, considering the meaning of the axe on the album cover, I can feel his determination to break away from the past and move on to a new phase.
"The album is a departure from my past music, to say the least.
For me it was a meditation on everything happening in the world at the time, and my own personal journey through it all. " (newsletter, February 6, 2021).
M1 "Invocation" is a multi-recorded baritone and alto saxes which purify the air and summon Pistiokos' new music. M2 "Journal: The Burden of Solidity". The industrial beat surprises me. It is said to be a rhythm generated using irrational numbers (real numbers that cannot be expressed in fractions, e.g. √2, pi). Pitsiokos raps, or rather, speaks words (poetry reading), while improvised saxophones cut through the air. M3 "Go Ahead Rick" is a heavy rock number featuring Rick Eye's guitar as the main instrument. The harmonica played by Pitsiokos creates a strangely bright pastoral atmosphere. The mismatch of heaviness and emptiness leads to the emptiness of an unrealistic self-restrained life. M4 "Lapsarian (The World After the Fall of Adam and Eve)" is an abstract song with break beats, to be called a saxophone version of rap. M5 "Journal: The Burden of Memory" is a spoken word number that is a counterpart to M2. The harmonica again creates a sentimental mood. As Jason Nagy's drumming continues its unhurried improvisation in the background, Pitsiokos' spoken word becomes a downer murmur that morphs into Eye's distorted guitar. The album's final track, M6, "Question Mark," is a folk song sung by Pitsiokos on guitar. To be honest, he is not a very good guitarist nor a very good singer, but I felt that he had reached a state of enlightenment, saying "this is me" in a vague floating feeling.
Although there are guitarists and drummers on this album, what is depicted on this album is definitely the soul and body of one man, Chris Pitsiokos. A year of extraordinary living is never a waste of time for this artist, but become the most useful period of transformation in his lifetime.
(April 27, 2021）
Journal: The Burden of Memory
★日本語レビューはこちら⇒https://jazztokyo.org/reviews/cd-dvd-review/post-64854/
Move to
The Next Level
With Pandemic
Strictly Missionary (Chris Pitsiokos, Wendy Eisenberg, Richard Lenz, Kevin Murray, Nick Neuberg)
Chris Pitsiokos - alto saxophone
Wendy Eisenberg - guitar
Richard Lenz - bass
Kevin Murray - drums
Nick Neuberg - percussion
at Valentino Pier - Red Hook Brooklyn - Mar 27 2021
