Description:
Eli Winter – A Trick of the Light (2025)
Review:
It’s hard not to feel a sense of place when listening to Eli Winter’s music. From his first solo effort to his myriad collaborations, Winter often evokes bucolic landscapes with his precise fingerpicking and lilting major-key melodies, conjuring up panoramic vistas and cascading streams with preternatural ease. A Houston native and self-taught wizard of the American Primitive style of folk music, he feels particularly freed from any overwrought sense of tradition or constrictions that fellow adherents can often fall prey to. There’s a certain frontier spirit, a Western sense of exploration and adventure rather than a hidebound historicity, to his particular approach. That spirit also finds a more distinct sense of place in his adopted hometown of Chicago, where Winter has burnished his artistic vision by diving deep into the city’s eclectic experimental music scene. Over a slew of LPs and collaborations, he’s gradually shifted his solo-acoustic reveries towards both more expansive and unconventional forms, embracing the free jazz and post-rock spirit of a scene that birthed groups like Tortoise and Gastr del Sol, but also houses more populist acts like Wilco and American Football. All of those bands and more inform Winter’s new LP A Trick of the Light, his second album on the boutique Three Lobed Recordings and the first that feels fully of the Windy City’s wayward impulses. Winter spends far more time playing electric guitar than acoustic here, and elements of his collaboration with electronic artist Jordan Reyes, as well as the influence of the experimental pedal steel guitarist and frequent collaborator Sam Wagster (Mute Duo, 60 Strings), seem to have pushed him towards more distorted and abstract strokes. Wagster, drummer Tyler Damon (Dave Rempis, Tashi Dorji) and bassist Andrew Scott Young (Circuit Des Yeux, Ryley Walker) form the core group for these recordings, and each plays a profoundly active role across this heavily improvisatory six-song set that moves Winter firmly out of any notion of making “folk” music. The opening track, a 17-minute re-imagining of the Don Cherry composition “Arabian Nightingale,” provides an exclamatory statement of purpose. Winter builds a muscular, tightly-wound country-rock riff out of the fragmentary piano motif at the heart of Cherry’s tune, with each of the players, as well as guest saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher, easing into their parts with attentive patience as the tune billows, shrieks and then bleeds out several times throughout its run time. Cherry’s rich legacy as a player on Ornette Coleman’s seminal free jazz recordings is telling here, as moments of frenzied distortion and atonality sneak into the band’s jams, even as they give way to Winter’s characteristic rich sense of melody and space. But even more than outre jazz, “Nightingale” seems determined to draw from contemporaries like William Tyler, Steve Gunn and Chris Forsyth, a cohort of guitarists that feel comfortable drawing deeply from the terse post-punk wells of Television, the sweeping psychedelia of Grateful Dead rambles, or the avant-garde drone and ambient craft of Brian Eno or Pauline Oliveros. By privileging texture as much as technique and staying open to all of the compositional and collaborative possibilities of playing with sympathetic players, Winter finds a stunning new expressive mode for his finely honed chops and bold melodic sensibilities. Having said all that, A Trick of the Light’s second track, “For a Fallen Rocket,” is the most throwback number here, with Winter’s lush fingerpicking and overdubbed piano and electric guitar counterpoints as well as Wagster’s pastoral swells harkening back to his earlier efforts. Still, an attentive and active rhythm section and the return of Hatcher mean that plaintive ballad lifts and swings with the energy of a smoky jazz club, and the crackling intensity quickly returns with “Cracking the Jaw.” The tune condenses the energy and sprawl of “Nightingale” into a tight three minutes, building to a cathedral of guitar squalls as Wagster and Winter egg each other on. Side B picks up with another surprising cover, this time a country-tinged composition from noted free jazz pianist Carla Bley. Winter and company transform the song into a seedy jazz lounge track, driven by standout contributions from Damon and Young on acoustic bass. Winter almost entirely disappears as a bandleader for much of the runtime and lets the rest of the band amble along gracefully. He enters gradually and self-effacingly well into the song proper and then, after a short mid-song solo, he disappears with a signal-fading two-note riff as the rest of the band paints around him. The title track follows and once again showcases a sterling amount of full-band patience, with Winter slowly unfurling reverb-laden chords as the band gingerly dabs around him for a few minutes before Mike Watt (of Minutemen fame) enters with “lead” electric bass and the guitarist proceeds to take over with some feedback-drenched wailing that owes more to Sonic Youth than Neil Young. The tune feels almost like a preamble for the final number, “Black Iris on a Burning Quilt,” a suitable bookend to “Nightingale.” The bandleader opens with a slight, repetitive guitar riff that allows the rest of the band to gradually pick up the tune and lift it in the song proper. Guest players Kiran Leonard on cittern and bass clarinetist Alex McKenzie also join in, providing a kind of full-band version of the windspun romanticism of Winter’s early work as the song carries on with a sepia-toned road trip elegance. The song eventually builds to yet another dramatic peak, this one with traces of the soaring emotionalism of an Explosions in the Sky tune, only to die out with another distorted signal fade as the band drops into a quiet, elegant lassitude around the five-minute mark. After a few moments of silence, Winter leads the troupe through a weary afterglow with halting chordal exhalations that flicker and fade to the end of the tape. As a whole, A Trick of the Light is easily the most surprising record yet from Winter, embracing impulses both more avant-garde and populist (for instrumental music). The only real knock on the record at large is that, after that stunning 17-minute opener, the rest of the album can feel a bit slight by comparison, particularly given the improvisational possibilities that were so abundant. Here’s hoping that a live album featuring most of the same cast is in the works soon. In the meantime, Winter has undeniably made an album that feels wholly his own, showcasing an artistic vision worth following across many peaks and valleys. Or, depending on how you think about it, across the cold, frigid shoreline of Lake Michigan. — spectrumculture.com
Track List:
01 - Arabian Nightingale
02 - For a Fallen Rocket
03 - Cracking the Jaw
04 - Ida Lupino
05 - A Trick of the Light
06 - Black Iris on a Burning Quilt
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Origin: Chicago, Illinois, USA 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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