Dark Sunny Land KON TAAN KOR (Gulcher 702)

1. River of Doubt
2. Dying Factory
3. The Coming
4. Kon Taan Kor
5. Shaky Spoon Blues
6. Reincarnation

Boston's Steve Painter is Dark Sunny Land. He has also recorded as part of the duo 12 Cent Donkey and the trio JAS. Dark Sunny Land uses acoustic and electric guitars (often played in an unorthodox fashion), as well as keyboards, recorder, percussion, various household contraptions and other found sounds. The first Dark Sunny Land album--Kon Taan Kor--was recorded during the summer of 2008 and released in 2009 by Gulcher Records.

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The original idea if there ever was one was to have the sound be a lot closer to a Skip James record than how it turned out. But the feeling of the blues is still there, even if most of the blues chords and structure got turned inside out along the way. That's happened to me before. 2008 was a strange summer. I didn't have a job or much money and was pondering mortality more than usual. The recording got done mostly at night in my apartment, which looks out onto the Mass Turnpike. Trains run along the highway. While I was doing the recording I was working on some paintings. Looking back, it seems like the trains and the highway and the night affected the paintings and the songs in a big way--the mood of them, that is. I think each song is distinct though. Actually, you can hear the cars and trucks and even a train going by if you listen hard.

--Steve Painter

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Guitars, mostly. Abstracted, then reconstructed. Prepared, unprepared.

The purpose is sound, not chord progressions and scales; but there is organic movement in every track. There are grooves, but nothing you would tap your feet to; time dissolving rather than time insistent. The results evoke environments familiar but alien: a hint of blues behind sheets of distant sound.

Ambient? yes, but no new age.
Psychedelic? sure, but not 60s-style.
Industrial? it's there, but it's not bone-crushing.

You can hear the research as it happens, and its workings are intriguing.

--Roger Miller [Mission of Burma, Alloy Orchestra, Birdsongs of the Mesozoic]. Oct. 29, 2008. I-294 out of Chicago.