Matt LaJoie “Red Resonant Earth” CDR (Flower Room)

“Matt LaJoie has been a wellspring of cosmically attuned guitar explorations under a multitude of monikers since co-founding the uncannily prolific Flower Room label with Ash Brooks in 2017. The sprawling automatic compositions of Red Resonant Earth spring like mycorrhizae from the groundwork laid by kosimiche forerunners like Gottsching, Fricke, and Rother, reaching simultaneously toward realms both celestial and terrestrial. Immaculately looped passages of electric twelve-string wind like nimble tendrils through the opening textures of ‘Born Free’ and ‘Sprout’ before burrowing into the darker hues of ‘Mammoth’ and ‘Taos Hum > Claymaking,’ which spin out like Terry Riley and Roger McGuinn locked in perpetual dervish. When paired with Land Mass, a digital/tape counterpart via Flower Room, Red Resonant Earth exemplifies the grand expanse of LaJoie’s sonic vision. It’s music that delves deep into the reaches of the underland while LaJoie holds the lamp, pressing ever onward through subterranean caverns, his picking glimmering like caches of amethyst, until we emerge once again to see the light of the world anew. ” – Jarrod Annis, Aquarium Drunkard

*****

“These spacious exultations resonate in the moments of daybreak and twilight where the veil is thin and spirits dance and drift, filled with joyous abandon. LaJoie is a medium, channeling otherworldly sonic wizardry through his guitar. “Gilded Hilt” is chaotic in an ebullient way, notes sparking in all directions, but interconnected and sanctified. Not only does LaJoie’s music connect with astral ideas, it’s wholly of the Earth too. In a way, pieces like “Forest Sanctuary” or “Born Free” remind me of Sarah Louise’s brilliant Floating Rhododendron but electrified and saturated with a different light. LaJoie is still dancing with the same holistic shadows, however.

Red Resonant Earth has a lifeforce all its own as it flows through our veins, imbuing us with a subliminity that’s impossible to quantify. Torrents of golden vibrations wash away any desolation, at least for a moment, on the wondrous “Rusted Chalice.” It’s a song that looks inward, cauterizing wounds with silver flames, a shimmering beacon for rest. LaJoie is so dialed in I wouldn’t be surprised if he was levitating.

Constellations built from green tendrils and aromatic flowers surround LaJoie throughout Red Resonant Earth. His sonic garden moves with the wind, hovering in the clouds weightless and bathed in light. When the title track starts glowing with a chiming ecstasy about halfway in, the world stands still and we find a common connection with the soil. Our essence awake and hearts open, LaJoie guides us back home.” – Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis

*****

“Matt LaJoie continues to conjure the very spirit of nature itself through his cosmic guitar wizardry on the excellent Red Resonant Earth. The tracks on this album feature nothing but LaJoie’s bright guitar lines, all overdubbed and layered on top of each other, rippling and blending together into an array of unusual tones and hues. On songs like “Forest Sanctuary,” the 12-string mimics the movement of tree branches swaying in the breeze and the patterns of dancing sunlight that peek around the leaves. The sound of the guitar, which at times is similar to an electric oud, is always as pleasant and golden as dawn’s first light and as sweet as an ocean breeze.

Elsewhere on the album, like the title track, LaJoie even creates high-pitched percussive twinkling sounds with his instrument, which produces a dazzling sensation. It easily brings to mind images of things like bright lunar reflections shimmering across the choppy surface of a nocturnal sea or a night sky full of streaking meteors.

Throughout the album, LaJoie’s guitar playing is always meditative and relaxed, as though he is actively experiencing the natural scenes that he’s projecting through his improvisations in real time. You get the sense that wandering down his fret board like this is his way of reaching a deep, internal peace. Fans of Popol Vuh, Jerry Garcia and Michael Rother need this record (and all of LaJoie’s records, for that matter).” – Keith Hadad, Record Crates United

*****

“Matt LaJoie’s current run of improvised records has been fruitful to say the least. Spanning three recordings over the past couple of years, and drawing from an elemental aura — the first water, the second fire, and now an album of songs meant to return to the earth — his latest finds Matt nudging the album to life with a horticulturalist’s eye. Recorded over two 45-minute sessions on an unfamiliar instrument (a borrowed Danelectro 59M 12-string electric guitar) Red Resonant Earth folds in many of the themes of his previous two outings, the tone shifts, but he lets the dewy air feed his creation and the sun’s warmth urge the seeds of songs to fruition.

At its core there’s a must of soil that hangs heavy, but more so a feeling of growth and of life to the pieces. Songs like “Rusted Chalice” and “Gilded Hilt” have a cyclical nature to them — blooming, stretching, receding. The songs turn towards the sun in slow movements. They inhale anxieties, exhale focus. It’s easy to get lost inside of LaJoie’s playing, but once the dream of strings evaporates into the air, the peace lingers in the synapses long after. If Everlasting Spring and Paraclete Tongue already grace your collection, then I don’t think any convincing is needed, but newcomer or old, this is another strong argument that LaJoie’s works are essentials antigens to the forces of chaos constantly brewing.” – Andy French, Raven Sings The Blues

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I’ve been told there is an aspect of my birth chart that suggests my life’s work as being that of a “spiritual gardener”. This can be interpreted in both literal and metaphorical ways, but I understand it most clearly through my natural orientation to reinforce the conscious, metaphysical link from the cosmos to the stuff of Earth, as can be experienced by all sentient life. Just as the gardener is the creative medium through which higher forces transcend to the material plane, allowing Earth matter to be transformed in myriad ways for the delight of our senses, it’s possible to see this as the essential work of artists in every medium. Great horticulturists understand that most of the “work” of raising life is merely being a guiding, fostering, and editing hand in the process of sunlight, air, water, mineral, and seed entering into a perfect collaborative creative unfoldment. Through this vision, we can experience nature as our closest terrestrial analogue to Divinity, and to view improvisation and spontaneity–inspired action–as an echo of the original creative impulse that is endlessly unfolding in the natural world.

Improvisation has always been a key component of my music, but over the past several months while working on my song-a-day Colander project, it has become the *only* part of my creative process. Beyond that step, my work is purely as an editor – or, to extend the metaphor, a pruner. What I’ve found fascinating about this practice (which I mean in the religious sense) is that there’s always more waiting to be experienced and expressed; seeds drifting on the winds, seeking the gardener’s awareness and receptive hand to plant them firmly in the soil. I think this is the only way I can explain where these songs came from.

Red Resonant Earth was recorded in March 2021 across two 45-minute sessions at our home studio, the first recordings made in my third home of the past year. I was instantly drawn to our new housemate’s Danelectro 59M 12-string electric guitar, and after a quick tuning hastily set up gear to start recording immediately. The guitar went into a Line 6 DL4 delay/looper, then directly into the board – as simple a setup as possible.

What comes across in the sessions is a sensitive feeling out of a new instrument (“Red Resonant Earth”), alternating with an invigorated, boldly free playfulness (“Return to Rock Pick Mountain”), often within the same song (“Forest Sanctuary”, “Rusted Chalice”, “Born Free”). 12-string guitar (and the modified 10-string I have often used on past recordings) feels uniquely suited to music honoring the sanctity of nature, as well as the uncanniness of being a modern human submerged in wilderness. Strings buzzing just slightly out of perfect academic harmony (“Sprout”), drones leaning into a cicadan scale (“Taos Hum > Claymaking”), and unmetered or imperfect loops that mimic the rhythms of birdsong (“Gilded Hilt”, “Mammoth”) evoke both the pastoral and the rapturously sacred. The presence of electricity and technology are also honored – guitar strings electronically manipulated into industrial noise or synthesizer-like tones, looped, reversed, sped up and slowed down. Perhaps this is a modern echo of American Transcendentalism, one that embraces technology for its potential for expanded communion and communication, finding a place where the machine and the garden coexist as easy collaborators.

But the meaning I’m imbuing here is superfluous: certainly, these philosophies were not on my mind as the music was being created. In fact, immediately after both sessions I had the impression that not much of value had been accomplished at all. Mixing and editing the tracks weeks later, however, I began to get the picture. Some songs are meant for the winds: ephemeral, to be heard in a single moment by the elements and unseen beings. These songs wished to be planted. May they resonate.

– ML, July 2021