from Shuffle Magazine:
by Eric Shepherd Martin (continued)
While all songs are Bachelder's compositions, its the ensemble that paints a picturesque instrumental landscape filled with glockenspiels and marimbas, rototoms and vibraphones. The melodies on Ten Songs also show that those terms are negotiable. While the glistening spaciness of a tune like Three Pieces' "Parallax" is still intact, the ensemble's new endeavor shows the troupe coming down from the ethereal landscape and occasionally venturing into its own twangy backyard. This is evident within the album's first moments, when the country-tinged guitar riff is abruptly overpowered by the group's more typical sound. The album's second track- a cover of Steven Foster's folk classic, "Oh! Susannah"- employs a piano-xylophone duet to crescendo into the well-worn campfire lyrics. The rest of Ten Songs, a mix of covers and original material, follows suit in a hybrid of space-rock and bluegrass. "I see it as a kind of fusion, in a way," Bachelder says. "Its not prog by any means, but I'm trained as a composer, as well as a percussionist, so I incorporate a lot of elements of classic minimalism as well as world music. I incorporate those into a rock context."
And while one could easily exploit the artists' inherent handicaps (cf: Los Angeles' The Kids of Widney High), for Bachelder they're such an integral part of his sound that he doubts whether his melodies could have been born without them. "I think that one of the remarkable things about working with this group of people is that they're really wide open to all kinds of music," he says. "In a lot of ways they're much more free of musical prejudice than most other musicians that I've worked with. These people have no axes to grind about one particular kind of music. they have no problem with playing strange time-signatures... because they haven't grown up developing that kind of prejudicial ear, so that gives us an opportunity to vary the texture even more."