Fortunately, as anyone who follows Walker on Twitter knows, the man does not lack for whimsy, and his musical appetite extends far beyond the stodgy and respectable. Seemingly prioritizing brain over heart, this music threatened to devolve into an academic exercise if not performed with breathless curiosity and whimsy. It was known as post-rock, but it was far removed from the widescreen drama of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions In The Sky. The musicians in that ’90s Chicago scene merged jazz, dub, krautrock, avant-garde classical, and all sorts of ultra-hip record-nerd genres into music that embodied their city’s placid lakefront views and trains clattering overhead. Alongside the likes of Gastr Del Sol and the Sea And Cake, McEntire’s band helped to define the heady, exploratory sound Walker has been channeling in recent years. This time he even got a member of Tortoise to produce.įor Course In Fable, Walker convened his longtime collaborators Bill MacKay, Andrew Scott Young, and Ryan Jewell at Soma Sound, the Portland outpost of former Tortoise percussionist John McEntire. Yet on the new Course In Fable, his first self-described “indie rock” album in three years, he continues to refine that eclectic Chicago sound he’s been edging toward all these years. Less than two months ago he dropped Deep Fried Grandeur, a live recording of his band’s onstage collaboration with Japanese psych kings Kikagaku Moyo. In 2020 he released far-out experimental improv records with Kendra Amalie and the team of J.R. He continues to explore a purer folk idiom on releases like 2019’s Little Common Twist with Charles Rumback. Like key inspiration Jim O’Rourke, Walker is far too adventurous a musician to be locked into one mode. By the time he moved to Brooklyn and dropped Deafman Glance in 2018, Walker was openly attempting to evoke the sensations of the city he had just left behind, chasing after “the sound of walking home late at night through Chicago in the middle of winter and being half-creeped out, scared someone’s going to punch you in the back of the head, and half in the most tranquil state you’ve been in all day, enjoying the quiet and this faint wind, and buses going by on all-night routes.” That album’s 1960s-vintage English folk stylings began to morph on his 2016 follow-up Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, incorporating more of the jazzy post-rock that has been a Chicago staple since the ’90s. Yet despite the band of Chicago jazz musicians he recorded it with, if Walker’s 2015 breakthrough Primrose Green sounded like anywhere in the world, it was the British Isles. Walker called the Windy City home for years, eagerly subsuming many corners of its music scene into his own creative DNA. Ever since Ryley Walker moved to New York, his albums have sounded unmistakably like Chicago.
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