Nielsen Music said the album, which Walker describes as a "psychedelic groovy record," has been streamed online about 443,000 times. Pitchfork called the album's 10 songs, "acts of pure creative anachronism and affection."ĭead Oceans, Walker's record label, says 11,000 copies of the album have been sold, about 9,000 on CD and 2,000 downloads, in the U.S. "A headphone trip for the ages" proclaimed the website Popmatters, "Primrose Green is a diaphanous tapestry that envelops our musical history." "Like a lost relic from 1970s," said a critic for The Guardian, a London paper, calling "Primrose Green" stoned, summery, folk jazz. and Europe, conjuring comparisons to post-World War II British folk music with a Chicago twist. His album, " Primrose Green," released in March on well-known indie record label Dead Oceans, was greeted with acclaim and awe by critics in the U.S. He's become an acoustic fingerpicker with a style that critics say transcends genre and belies his age. ![]() After graduating from Harlem High School in 2007, his path as a guitarist has turned to a sound more suited to a Parisian listening room than a massive festival. If it doesn't happen it won't disappoint Walker, 26. Listen to A Tap on the Shoulder in the context of Ryley’s glorious Course in Fable listento it in the context of Grubbs’s playing with Loren Connors, Jim O’Rourke, Taku Unami, and others or listen to it as if you’ve never heard note one from these soulful odd birds, the two of them curiously, quixotically committed to working inside and beyond song form.ROCKFORD - Guitarist Ryley Walker, a kid of local skate parks and punk bands, once set a high school goal of playing guitar before 50,000 people. Juggernauts, A Tap on the Shoulder toggles effortlessly between microscope, telescope, and Cinemascope, letting the smallest of gestures land in all of its sonic specificity before opening the scene up to disorienting panoramas. And where the duo’s live performances thus far have been set-length What’s good for the geezer is good for the, etc. Ryley’s hellion musical fearlessness lights a fire under the more typically Apollonian, chess-masterly Grubbs. ![]() Don’t think for a second that these shorthand descriptions suffice.Įlectric guitars make electronic music. Studio sessions were clearly in the cards, and the result is A Tap on the Shoulder, a collection of duo performances that veers from crystalline instrumental compositions (“A Tap on the Shoulder,” “Accepting Most Plans,” “Dorothy Kept”) to animated alien chatterfests (“Leslie Steinberger”), and from ecstatic extrapolations charging this way and that (“Pump Fake on the Death Rattle,” “The Madman from Massachusetts in an Empty Bar”) to, I don’t know, words don’t do the trick (“Uglification”). (One of these live sets was released earlier this year as Fight or Flight Simulator on Café OTO’s Takuroku label.) Mutual admiration society and David Grubbs and Ryley Walker had been taking notes on one another’s playing for some time before they hit the stage together on a couple of blistering occasions immediately pre-pandemic. How about now? (Not for you to decide.) Or exactly what it means-except in the aftermath. You never know when that tap’s going to come.
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