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Norman Westberg

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Norman Westberg, “Jasper Sits Out” (Room40, 2017)

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Room40’s excavation campaign of Norman Westberg’s wonderfully hypnotic and self-released solo guitar work continues with this 2014 tribute to the Westberg family dog. Notably, this release was already reissued once before (as an extremely limited vinyl edition by Hallow Ground), but this new incarnation is both remastered and expanded. 

More notable still, Jasper Sits Out was the first of Westberg’s homemade releases that Lawrence English ever heard, making it the album that inadvertently dragged this quietly beautiful facet of his artistry into the light. As such, I half-expected Jasper to be a towering culmination of the entire reissue campaign, but it is more or less on the same level as all the consistently fine preceding releases (aside from one truly dazzling piece).

The original version of Jasper was comprised of two epic 20-minute compositions, the title piece and “Homeset Trunc.” The opening “Jasper” is very much textbook Westberg, beginning as kind of a warm and insistently pulsing haze before cleaner tones appear to weave a shifting, jangling, and ringing melodic foreground. 

The magic of the piece lies in how seamlessly and organically Westberg plays with that central motif, building an undulating pointillist fog with calmly insistent forward momentum. In doing so, he achieves two desirable feats at once: creating a dreamlike and hypnotic throb while ceaselessly crafting an unpredictable and complex web of evolving harmonies and micro-rhythms. It is amusing and unexpected that someone associated with the crushing juggernaut of Swans may be even more gifted in the arts of nuance, restraint, and patience. 

Yet another trait that separates Westberg from like-minded solo guitarists is that his laser-focused control even extends to the compositional arc of his pieces. When an artist is performing alone with just some looping pedals, the tendency is almost always to keep all the plates spinning until all of the necessary elements are in place for the crescendo, then elegantly fade away. “Jasper” admirably bucks that trend by resolving into a final repeating chord. It may not be electrifying or dramatic, but it is undeniably effective and satisfying.

The atypically industrial “Homeset Trunc” is quite a bit different, boasting a steadily throbbing and churning machine-like rhythm. Naturally, Westberg exploits that strong percussive undercurrent as an opportunity to plunge deeper into abstraction than usual. At first, he keeps things rather subdued and modest, but after several minutes the bottom drops out and the piece grows dramatically more hallucinatory. 

As the deeper tones plunge and warp, Westberg weaves a rippling web of arpeggios that gradually becomes a dense and swirling cloud of twinkling, pulsing, and undulating layers. Needless to say it is quite beautiful, but the best part is that the heavenly ocean of shimmer is periodically disrupted by surges of ugly vibrato and pitch-shifts to add a welcome element of menace and fragility. I can honestly say that I never heard anything quite like it from another guitarist and I cannot even begin to unravel the mechanics of how it was assembled or performed: it is truly a tour de force. 

Although it takes a while to catch fire, the pay-off is mesmerizing enough to make it a solid candidate for my favorite Westberg piece to date. Given that, the newly added “A Particular Tuesday” has quite a tough act to follow, but it proves to be a fine coda despite my unreasonably high expectations. It is admittedly a bit less distinctive and more overtly improvisatory than the rest of the album, but it compensates by being more melodic and instantly gratifying. It kind of sounds like a languorous and glimmering ten-minute interlude during a Slowdive live set designed to give the rhythm section a break, but it gradually fades away rather than erupting into a song.

Aside from noting that the bonus track is not quite on the same level as the original album, the only real critiques than can be leveled at Jasper Sits Out are about what it is not rather than what it is. Given that Westberg performed the entire album himself with a guitar, there are some very fundamental dynamic, textural, and compositional limitations: for the most part, Jasper Sits Out unavoidably sounds like a solo guitar album. 

That is perfectly fine by me, of course—when Westberg is in his usual form, as he is on the title piece, he is easily one of the most beguiling and distinctive solo guitarists active today. At his best, however, he transcends the self-imposed constraints of his craft to plunge into sublime and rarefied territory all his own. He is at that level with “Homeset Trunc,” reaffirming yet again my belief that Westberg is secretly one of the strongest minimalist composers of his generation.

Listen here.

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Norman Westberg, “MRI” (Room40, 2016)

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As much as I love Swans, one of 2015’s great mysteries for me was trying to figure out why some people liked Norman Westberg’s solo 13 album so much, as it just seemed like a very straightforward ambient-drone album in every way. Consequently, I did not have especially high expectations for Room40’s second Westberg reissue, which compiles three even earlier pieces from his homemade, self-released CDrs. 

As it turns out, however, MRI is a hell of a lot more compelling than its predecessor. While the general aesthetic is basically the same (hazy processed-guitar soundscapes), MRI features considerably more in the way of subtle dynamic shifts and disquieting dissonances. Aside from just being deeper, more complex, and more nuanced than what I had previously heard, this album is actually quite distinctive and unique as well. I now completely understand why Lawrence English was so keen to unearth Westberg’s largely unheard solo oeuvre.

The prosaically titled MRI ostensibly takes its inspiration from magnetic resonance imaging, which Westberg underwent when he discovered that he was experiencing uneven hearing loss. However, the degree to which that experience shaped this album is quite hard to unravel, as the provenance of these recordings is a bit confounding. 

Of the three pieces included here, one (“Lost Mine”) is a new piece dating from 2015 and another (“410 Stairs”) was the title track of its own self-contained 2012 release. Also, the original “MRI” apparently surfaced in 2012 as well, but it is something of a phantom: it only appears in Discogs as part of a compilation pulling together Westberg’s MRI, 410 Stairs, and Plough EPs. 

Moreover, “MRI” is not particularly obvious in its nods to medical scanning technology, seemingly borrowing only the subtle cycling/pulsing sounds and perhaps evoking a bit of immersive unreality of being cozily inserted into the heart of a machine. Thankfully, Westberg did not derive any inspiration from the annoying buzzing sounds common to MRIs.

While Westberg used SoundForge to originally edit these newly remastered pieces, the originally recordings were done with a very stripped-down set-up that usually consisted of a just a guitar, some delay effects, and a couple of amps recorded to tape. Also, “MRI” was essentially recorded “live” in one take. Nothing on MRI sounds improvised or sketch-like though, as the overall effect is one of elegantly simple variations on a theme. 

The theme itself is quite simple as well, as Westberg essentially just creates a warmly droning bed of guitar haze and tape hiss, then embellishes it with quavering rhythmic waves and shivering dissonances. Working with such a limited palette proves to be very effective here, as each minor shift in pulse or harmony is able to make maximum impact because there is no clutter to hide behind and no melodies to grab the focus: just a beautiful, gently throbbing drift that gradually changes moods as the smallest changes trigger new oscillations and complex, unexpected harmonies. 

On the opening title piece, the drones gradually become more shadowy and ominous, culminating in the brief eruption of an undercurrent that sounds legitimately gnarled. The longer and more beautiful “410 Stairs” is not nearly as haunted-sounding, however, instead maintaining a consistent mood of bittersweet warmth that gradually builds in power with layers of jangling, bell-like waves. The closing “Lost Mine” initially starts in a somewhat similar mood, but heads in a very different direction, as blurry, treble-heavy layers bleed into one another and drift in and out of sync to create a gently psychedelic blur.

Interestingly, Room40’s Lawrence English describes Westberg’s work as “embedded strongly in the American Minimalism tradition.” I am not sure who he specifically had in mind, but these pieces certainly do betray an affinity for patterns and repetition. In any case, something transcendent is certainly happening: the tools and textures employed on MRI share a lot of common ground with what other experimental guitarists were doing around the same time, yet the best moments show that Westberg was operating on a much higher plane compositionally than his peers. 

To my ears, MRI positions Westberg as a kind of a DIY/low-tech Eliane Radigue, attempting to distill drone down to its purest, most minimal form: a single sustained tone that comes alive as a number of small, controlled changes cumulatively create their own shifting pulse and harmonic arc. On the gorgeous “410 Stairs” and some sections of “MRI,” Westberg comes as close to reaching that state of drone nirvana as anyone.

Listen here.