Written by: Dave Cantrell

It’s rather a given that unforeseen surprises of the most pleasantly unexpected kind are among the most treasured of our experiences as we traipse with impulsive, edge-of-0ur-seat hope down the path toward music-based excitement/satisfaction/amazement etc. From the Beatles forceful drift toward the unrestrained fields of Pepperland through the Velvets’ unparalleled (and immediate) dive into the theretofore unexplored corners of lurid urban wastelands to Radiohead’s only-barely-hinted-at abandonment of any and all of their fans’ pop-construction expectations via the juddering beauty of Kid A, such moments of suddenly shifted parameters cannot help but shake up the audio cosmos and, it must be said, to pretty much unvaryingly positive affect. That said, the none-more-brave act of diverging from what one’s followers may have come to expect into the sound arts equivalent of a brave new world isn’t restricted to the mega bracket. In fact, dating back to the early jazz years (at least) and careening through the rabidly restless late 60s before punk (and especially post-) came barreling to the fore in the late 70s, the ragged restless urge to break preset brackets to pieces was a very active creative mechanism of much-needed destruction/rebirth. Since then, though, it must be said that said collective breakthroughs have been a bit thinner on the ground and/or suspect as to their belonging in that zeitgeist-shifting club in the first place (and yeah, grunge, we’re looking at you) but, not surprisingly in retrospect, the shifts toward new frontiers have tended to bend toward the more subtle, quieter if no less momentous, a shift, we suspect, that derives from the very fact that ‘genres’ (is there any way to not put that word inside inverted commas?) themselves have subdivided with such force inside their own cultural petri dishes that, as a construct, they’ve just about made themselves superfluous. And it’s with that – admittedly long but couldn’t be helped – preamble, that we come to this new proposition sitting before us in the form of a certain trio whose collectively – which is to say delightfully – irascible backgrounds carry with them into this project a quiet tsunami of expectation. Named, with some not unexpected ironic self-effacement, SQUANDERERS and featuring the ever-questing Kramer accompanied with both grace and force by Wendy Eisenberg (Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet among multiple other projects) and Gastro Del Sol (and/or Squirrel Bait, Palace, The Red Krayola et al) alumnus David Grubbs, the trio throughout – and not least on our featured track here – take us to those quieted depths where emotion meets subtle-but-insistent-intuition meets a level of revelation that feels as much blood-borne as it does cerebral.

Filled with what might well be termed a ‘warm-hearted avant-wistfulness,’ our featured cut unspools over its near 3 1/2 minutes like an aural dawn suffused with light as somber as it is inherently mysterious, managing in the process to feel both cutting-edge and a kind of undyingly nostalgic. Not an easy task in anyone’s book, this trio, through a synthesis of simpatico instincts and a level of reflexive production that provides the sound here (as it did on 2024’s SQUANDERERS debut If A Body Meet A Body, also on Shimmy-Disc) with a pretty much preternatural shine however subtly applied. Accompanied as it is (and couldn’t help but be) by images – following the none more astute self-descriptive line of text “All of this is a part of dredging the past up i to the present…” – so evocative of the track’s essence as to suggest the track was conceived while simultaneously watching the footage unfurl in real/unreal time, there is arguably no way this track could have been granted a finer visual representation (a tendency, by the way, that has become a Kramer trademark of sorts over the past half decade or so).

There are few artists we can think of whose obsessive curiosity and desire for new creative playing fields that also happen to be magnetic in their (often quiet) magnitude compares to that of the ever-roving Kramer. When accompanied as he is here by musicians that intrinsically share such a deeply abiding curiosity as to where such intensely hushed sounds can take one – into some ineffably deep places, it turns out – the results can promise little else but the sublime, what other word for it?