This ambitious and aptly titled new album from upstate NY synth wizard M. Geddes Gengras is something akin to a wild and eccentric game of the surrealist parlor game Exquisite Corpse, as Gengras handed off his raw synth recordings to a wide and varied array of collaborators and offered them “creative carte blanche” for their additions (albeit with minimal instructions). The idea is a playful and somewhat ingenious expansion upon how Gengras’ beloved modular synthesizers work, as “each new element added to the chain affects the whole, which can produce unexpected results.” As evidenced by this album, the same is definitely true of collaborators as well, yet Gengras also took inspiration from other chance-based composition strategies such as John Cage’s I-Ching experiments or Autechre’s complex algorithmic mutations. As far as I know, however, no indeterminacy-inspired composers ever recorded an album quite like this one, as Guest List is a charmingly playful and freewheeling fun house of wild and audacious aesthetic collisions and juxtapositions.
In a way, Guest List seems like an album that Gengras was always destined to make, as his entire career has been eclectic, freewheeling, and collaboration-filled, as I first encountered him through his seemingly ubiquitous presence on every good Not Not Fun project in the early 2000s and he has since blown me away at least once with both his outsider techno alias (Personable) and his collected Moog works. He has also taken quite a deep dive into Jamaican dub production techniques with Sun Araw’s Cameron Stallones, as the two launched the dancehall imprint Duppy Gun after collaborating with The Congos in 2011. In short, Gengras is a guy who has seemingly tried his hand at damn near every possible strain of arty underground music at this point.
Unsurprisingly, not all of those directions were quite meant to be, so there have been several Gengras albums over the years that were very much not my scene at all. Given that, each new album or fresh project is basically an “all bets are off” scenario for me and Guest List distills that career-long creative roulette wheel into just a single album. Fittingly, it features plenty of surprises and a similarly unpredictable hit-to-miss ratio, but one of those many surprises is that there are so few stylistic traces of Gengras’ chameleonic past in his own synth parts, as Guest List would probably fall on the more ambient/New Age end of the synth spectrum if all of the non-synth tracks were carved away (which is roughly where I would expect a current Gengras solo album to land). While I have no idea if Gengras was feeling creatively blocked before embarking upon this album, this collaborative “it takes a village” approach certainly seems like a brilliant remedy if he was, as a lot of these pieces ultimately wound up in impressively fresh terrain nowhere near where they started.
For me, Gengras’ biggest stroke of genius was his decision to enlist some absolutely killer drummers for this project, as Otto Hauser ’s intense freeform drumming launches the jazzy “Motore” into the stratosphere, while Greg Fox unleashes one hell of a clattering whirlwind in the twinkling “Seven Dials.” Elsewhere, the languorous post-rock of “The List Is Millions Long” benefits greatly from Colin Blanton’s “funky drummer” heroics, while the blown-out hip-hop of “Soup” swaps out a live drummer for some wild “bitcrushed boom-bap.” In the non-percussive realm, Six Organs’ Ben Chasny teams up with Gengras for the mesmerizing “Laplace/Montagne,” as an understated and unhurried guitar reverie gradually becomes enveloped in a swirling and swooping maelstrom of synth sounds. I also dug the tragically brief “Bad Transport,” which resembles an instrumental and dramatically less morose Portishead, as a trippy squall of guitars, clarinets, and electronics unfolds over a slow and sensuous vamp.
Naturally, there are plenty of other interesting performances strewn throughout the album as well, as damn near every song features new collaborators from varying backgrounds. In particular, I was impressed by Will Epstein’s soulful and post-coital sounding sax in “The List Is Millions Long“ and WANDA GROUP’s rambling and enigmatic monologue in “The Weather,” yet this whole album is a wonderfully drifting and disorienting swirl of inventive genre mutations that feels effortlessly unstuck in time, as the charmingly chaotic parade of influences covers everything from ‘80s art punk to jazz to hip-hop to “early Pro Tools” luminaries like Tortoise and Joan of Arc. In fact, the only truly consistent thread that runs through everything is an endearingly sincere desire to explore unexpected new directions and make an album that feels like a fun underground music house party in which every guest brings a fresh splash of color to an eclectic and shapeshifting all-night jam.
