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Tim Motzer is a musician so wide open that there is almost no look at tradition. While improvising and well into a space doing the thing he wants it is hard for him to think about the past or the future. He is too busy learning new things about himself, things he would have never known had he not done the searching. Motzer's album Live From Star's End is loaded with lush layered guitar orchestrations that may not have been thought out completely ahead of time, but were certainly thought about deeply. Like a benevolent spell that refuses to break this hour long set is a work the listener visits, not merely listens to. From wild color and barely controlled chaos, where its sheer strangeness sustains our curiosity, to an odd sonic emptiness Motzer plays lithe and liquid solos with breathtaking ease - and provides productive slumber for the listener and audio radiance for the radio audience. Part of the now legendary 3 November 2013 all live music broadcast of STAR'S END Ambient Radio Motzer's set seems to be more about shaping form than about the playing of ordered notes. In this context, live on the air of a venerable spacemusic radio show, he incorporates other things but does not alter the philosophy of the music or format. In some places the music seems like a self-organizing system - and that once the work gets to a certain level of complexity it goes in its own direction, while elsewhere it is coaxed and guided by the artist in beautiful sonorities, textures and harmonies. While Tim Motzer's live musical ideas presented on STAR'S END provokes thought and binds genres, his work here is really about the plasticity of time, and how it may be felt as both infinite and finite, elusive and recognizable - the six-string part of a six-hour odyssey Live From Star's End.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 11 April 2014 |
